The Reality Zone
by Merridian
Summary: A thought is a meaningless electrospasm. To dream is to imagine that which is all but unfathomable. Comprehensibility is variable and not guaranteed. This is not lucid. This is the Reality Zone. FINISHED.
1. Negated CrossSectional Fortitude

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Neon Genesis: Evangelion, _A Love Supreme_ by John Coltrane, the rights to the name Genesis or Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins or _Duke_ (and I don't want those, either), Coca Cola, Diet Coke, _The Second Annual Report _by Throbbing Gristle, the Beatles, any and all characters/objects/general associations associated with any and all of the recognizable products/companies/real figures mentioned.

**Author's Note:** I'd just like to thank William S. Burroughs for being the genius that he was, and Bob Dylan for "Desolation Row".

* * *

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Negated Cross-Sectional Fortitude

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"_A Love Supreme_ changed history, man! You can't deny the facts!" Shigeru was bent over the cafeteria table, hands splayed out against the cool surface. His hair got in front of his eyes and that bothered him a little bit, but it mostly served as an eerie effect to keep his coworker, desk mate, and overall world defender comrade on edge—intimidation techniques work best when the intimidated can't see the intimidator's eyes—said so in a book he read.

"I'm not trying to suggest otherwise," Makoto put his hands up, shrugging, holding his turkey sandwich with one of them. A pickle fell out. "I'm just trying to say that maybe it wasn't as great as you're trying to make it out to be—"

"Oh, what, John Coltrane not _good_ enough for you? Is that it?" Shigeru sat down, took a long drink from the Coke he had on the table. Twenty ounce bottle, purchased from the vending machine down the hall, some yen equivalent to $1.00—would say more, but I don't know how the economy will be doing in the years between then and now. "John Coltrane was a genius—more genius then you'll ever be! You know how he made it all so great? Superimposed harmonics, man! Superimposed harmonics." He sipped some more Coke.

Makoto shook his head. "Shig, I don't even know what that means."

"And you call yourself a music buff—"

"A pop music buff, sure—quiz me on Genesis—"

"Genesis sold out after Gabriel left—"

"You take that back!"

Lieutenant Ibuki ate her ham sandwich, the newest edition of _Extreme Metal Blood Death Journal! Monthly_ open next to the metal tray that was provided by the lunch room staff. Pictures of forty-year-olds in face paint breathing fire donned the front cover, the articles inside ranging from "How To Build Your Own Shrine To The Underworld In Two Hours" to "Extreme Walls of Sound: A Metalhead's Guide To Shrieking Distortion That Makes Your Head IMPLODE!!!"

The conversation continued in the background: "Look, if you want me to spell it out for you, it's easy—Genesis sold out. Done. All you have to understand is that Phil Collins is a moron and it'll all be okay—"

"Hey, he is not a moron! You ever listened to _Duke_?"

"Oh _please_—"

"No seriously—you hear what he does with _Duke_? The multilayering of the uh, harmonic um, you know what I'm trying to say." Makoto took a bite of his sandwich. "The oh, ah, um, chord progressions and stuff."

"Yeah right, like it can compare to _A Love Supreme_." Shigeru rolled his eyes and continued his relentless assault. "_A Love Supreme_ demonstrated a keen understanding of multilayered quasisymphonic resonation! His uncanny use of superimposed harmonics just further emphasized his modal tonalities that ranged all over the scale—and that's not even going into the differential counterpoints in the harmonic lines and the semi-variable chord progressions that kept the melodic undertones from sinking into the background."

Maya, who wasn't really paying attention anyhow, could only blink, take another bite of ham sandwich with dill, and go back to her magazine.

"Now you're just pulling stuff out of your ass!" Makoto threw his hands up. "I may not know a lot about music, I admit—but _what_ in the _hell_ is 'quasisymphonic resonation'?!"

Shigeru stuttered. "Ah—it's—what do you mean you don't know what that is?" He let the statement hang, silence punctuating his uncertainty.

Kaji sat down and quickly noticed the tension at the table, but he was hungry and didn't feel like moving. Instead, he took a bite out of his roast beef sandwich, and looked over at Maya. "How's it going?"

She stared at him, and then shrugged. "Not bad, I guess." She took a swig of Diet Coke, made a face, spoke again. "Do you know what quasisymphonic resonation is?"

Kaji blinked. "Well, if you know what resonation is, I suppose the answer could be pretty intuitive…" he trailed off, a thoughtful look on his features. "Hey, why don't we get together sometime later and discuss this in a more private environment. When's your shift end?"

After she felt the blush come over her, she frowned, and decided to ignore him. The title of the article she was reading was "Make That Annoying Noise Go Away: How To Keep Your Humbuckers Of Death From Humming Your Amp To Hell!!!" There was a picture of a man with a giant grimace on his face, superimposed upon a background of flames and demons. He had a guitar that was making his ears bleed. Maya felt his pain.

---

Shinji Ikari sat in the empty men's locker room, staring in a mirror, questioning the meaning of his existence.

"Why am I here?" He trailed a finger down the side of the mirror, the trail of oils smearing the polished glass. "All I ever do is cause others pain, and if they hurt because of me, then I guess it means that I'm nothing but a giant walking… hurt ball." He watched the face of himself in the mirror scrunch into a frown. "And hurt balls aren't wanted anywhere," he whispered, "because they cause nothing but pain. And I don't want to cause anyone pain. I don't like hurting people. But that is my nature, a hurt ball. And a hurt ball's nature is to cause pain. And that's what I do." The plug suit on the bench caught his eye; all twisted and wrinkled and dejected, it laid there on the bench like some object used and then thrown away. "Eva! The object that grants me pain and suffering, and yet, grants me peace as well…" he turned away from the mirror, his bare feet slapping the tile floor with sickening reality. He bent over, retrieved the plug suit, and breathed in deeply to absorb the scent of blood. "Mother…"

---

Rei never dreamed. This is why, when she found herself staring out across an enormous red ocean, she pondered the reason for her existence in this particular plane of reality. Though she could not see them, all the souls of everyone in the world gazed back at her from the pool of LCL, the primordial soup. From her vantage point on the shore, she stared back.

When she opened her eyes, she found that her cheek was all wet, as was the desk. And the Third Child was staring at her, touching her shoulder, sort of nudging her in an annoying manner that he was apt to do. The classroom was empty, but there he was, that pitiful look on his face, his uncertain nudges with the palm of his hand against her shoulder.

"Ayanami," he started to say, but then stopped, and she regarded him without curiosity.

Keeping eye contact, she used her sleeve to wipe away the saliva that had drooled out of her mouth. He looked away, full of shame.

"So that's how it is, is it?" He asked. The sun was suddenly setting, and his face was masked in shadow. "I should have known."

"Yes," a quiet voice, so full of mystery. "You should have." It echoed back at him after the door closed, and he was where?—stuck in an empty classroom. The door was locked for some unspecified reason.

---

All of a sudden, the theme music played, and a naked figure resembling Rei revolved around in circles for no specific reason, suspended over a lake, the moon silhouetting her figure, and after all that happened Misato's voice came from out of nowhere and told everyone what was going to happen next.

And, not knowing how to take this sudden lapse of logic, Shinji found himself back in his apartment when he swore that he was just standing in a classroom.

---

A few episodes passed uneventfully, but then for no reason at all they went backwards for awhile, and all the characters remembered what lay ahead even while they were trapped in the past.

---

A boy hummed a tune nearby. Shinji Ikari thought he vaguely recognized it, but he couldn't be sure. Minutes prior, he wasn't aware of the boy's presence. Blood lingered in his nostrils, and he didn't understand why.

"I think this is the pinnacle of lilim culture," the boy whose feet dangled sexually off of the statue gave him a sexual look that could have been interpreted as a sexual come on. "Don't you think so, Shinji Ikari?" He added the statement as sexually as possible. This beautiful silver-haired boy smelled like sex, looked like sex, sounded like sex, and radiated the lusts of the physical body out of every possible orifice.

Shinji was too straight to notice. "I'm sorry?"

"It is my own personal belief that suggests mammals are inherently drawn toward the sexual nature of senseless violence and needless suffering, and that, by developing the unconscious need for sex, the lilim have created a paradox of survival; to push the ones they most desire to have sex with away, they create a barrier of sexlessness and self loathing, and since all lilim want to have sex with all other lilim, the barrier of sexlessness is vast indeed, and thus all lilim are fundamentally alone."

"I-I don't understand." Shinji gave the boy an uncertain look, admiring his flawless physique that was so perfectly outlined by the needlessly setting sun.

"Sex, in all its grand enigmatic pleasures, is only a byproduct of the negative fear that is associated with all lilim interactions. The lilim seek to have sex because the lilim are afraid not to have sex, the consequences of such actions being too great to fully comprehend, relative to the overall aspect of lilim's divine sense of localized sexual divinity. God can only be found inside the aspect ratio of your unfathomable virginity, Shinji Ikari."

"But I don't—what are you trying to tell me?"

"However, even the intense pleasures of a sexual encounter cannot ward off the inherent nature of the solitary soul, so even should you experience a mind shattering orgasm unlike other you have ever experienced before, there will always be the fear of the other person's absence—and your sexual desire for that person stems only from your desire to have sex with him or her again, not from an actual spiritual need for that person's emotions or personality, but for a selfish physical need of that person's genitalia."

"…This isn't making any sense."

"My dear Shinji, this is because you are stupid and clueless." The boy smiled a dangerous sexual smile.

---

"Good afternoon, Fuyutsuki." The Commander walked into his chamber, the Sub Commander positioned near one of the windows. The man stood like a silhouetted statue, absorbing the view of the geofront.

At the sound of approaching footsteps and salutations, the man turned. "Ah, Ikari." The shorter man joined him at the window. "And what did the old men want?"

Gendo shoved his hands into his pockets. "The usual," he said.

"How did you handle the Second Annual Report that was to be turned into Kiel today?" Fuyutsuki scratched his cheek silently.

"I gave it to them."

The Sub Commander frowned. "Did you get one of the secretaries to make it up?"

"No," the Commander said.

"The Major?"

"Not the Major."

"You didn't do it."

"I did not."

"Neither did I."

"Neither did you."

Fuyutsuki remained puzzled. "I am puzzled, Ikari. How'd you pull this one off?"

The bearded man smirked. "I gave them a copy of _The Second Annual Report_."

"Throbbing Gristle." He didn't consciously do it, but his hand rubbed his temples and he let out a sigh. "You're a sick man."

Gendo nodded, the reflection of his smirk staring back at them both through the window. "That should throw them off for awhile."

---

Meanwhile, SEELE discussed plans to build a secret moon base to replace NERV, but relented after a tiresome several-hour long meeting came to the conclusion that it would be pointless trying to defend the Earth from Angels if the command center was on the Moon. And the morning commute would just be hell.

---

And it was decided, after much deliberation, that SEELE 12 would be the one to organize the catering at the next luncheon. It did not occur to them that, as all of their meetings took place as holographic teleconferences, luncheons were redundant, and they could all just tell their secretaries of wherever they actually were in real life to order Chinese and leave off the MSG sauce. But nobody thought about that.

---

"I am incredibly naïve!" Kensuke's enthusiasm was wasted in the empty shell of the school. His words echoed off the inside of the acoustically degenerative classroom. "I cannot express how naïve I am! I want to pilot giant weaponry capable of killing every single living being on the planet!" He pretends to shoot down Representative Horaki with his Mega-Uber-Detail Scale-Model-O-Figure VTOL manufactured by RenT-O-utSource Limited (Headquarters located in Warsaw, Poland—for free advertising, dial this number!). Instead of descending to the floor in plumes of smoke, Horaki snatched his camcorder and held it hostage for questionable items that shall not be divulged.

"Man, this sucks." Toji, who had hitherto gone unnoticed, relaxed with his feet on the desk. His tracksuit represented his unquestionable manliness.

Shinji said nothing, because he couldn't think of anything to say. Ironically, this same hindrance happened to be what kept his cohorts' mouths running nonstop—a paradox inverted simply by the unfathomable nature of the screwed up characters' psyches. In Shinji's case, he was too busy pondering the meaning of his existence to notice. "Why am I here?" he asked nobody in particular. He wasn't even listening to himself.

Kensuke beseeched the Class Representative. "I am a plot device!" he exclaimed in pathetic tones. "I am a two-dimensional plot device! I have no development! They just wrote me in here as an appliance to develop Shinji Ikari!" He might have been crying, but that's only if he actually had tear ducts like the rest of them. The animators might have forgotten to draw them in, since, I mean, come on—he's a plot device. Either way, his anguish was apparent—even in the English dub.

Suddenly, the door flew open and the teacher strode in, but forgot that he wasn't supposed to be written into the plot quite yet, as it was only 7:14AM and he wasn't supposed to appear for another six minutes. He disappeared in a puff of character inconsistencies.

The thought bubble that was Asuka strode into the classroom instead, though I had thought her presence had already been established earlier, but maybe I'm just—

---

This is a scene change to prevent further discombobulation, which it won't.

---

"…and the fifth time…" Rei dabbled her hand through the waters of the garden, mute appreciation playing across her face.

Shinji stared vacantly at her supple form.

"I want to hold your hand," she said.

He was stunned. "Rei…" he trailed off as he gazed into her red irises. "I had no idea you listened to the Beatles."

As she grasped his cold, clammy hand, shivers of excitement flooded her spine.

"I don't," she said.

---

An Angel came and blew up a few buildings, made some people mad. But then Unit-01 came blew its ass to hell. Or Unit-02. Or Unit-00. It doesn't matter. Anyway, Misato was left with tons of paperwork and the coffee maker in the lounge stopped working and Ritsuko bailed on their bar hopping night and Kaji was off in Kyoto and the Ibuki girl was busy spacing out at her post but it wasn't so bad since there was nothing to do anyhow and all the paperwork she had to do could always be put off since it didn't take a genius to figure out that the world was going to end real soon as the episodes were getting darker and darker with each number closer to 25 they got, but she was thankful that at least she still had a beer but was still kind of grumpy at it all and in the end everybody just had a headache. So she went home, fantasized for awhile, took a shower, and drank. This was how problems are solved in 2015.

---

The ceiling of Rei Ayanami's apartment was the most beautiful sight to behold only if you were blind, which Rei was not. She was, however, prone to think too deeply about the meaning of her existence and on life in general, which led to her comparison of the ceiling of her apartment to reality. She came up with an analogy:

"Dirt is to my ceiling as reality is to puppies."

Actually, she did not come up with that analogy at all. Part of it was already written on the walls of the stairwell when she moved in. This was the part that was already written:

"Arsenic is to puppies as graffiti is to the vandals of this construction site who keep putting snakes in our goddamn equipment come sundown. We're just doing our jobs, here, but NO! You kids have to come over and fuck up our lives for no damn reason at all!"

It said other things, but she could not remember the exact wording they used. She suspected it to be a warning, but when she retired to her bed after long hours of insomnia, she found her thoughts wandering back to the prophetic text written in bold red paint that trailed the ascending stairwell.

There was a deeper meaning there.

---

At ten pm, Misato Katsuragi was well on her way to getting stone drunk at the kitchen table of her apartment.

---

His S-DAT player died. The high-tech digital display kept blinking the same thing over and over: the little 'NO BAT' symbol, with the empty rectangle and the line that goes straight through it. Kept blinking that, over and over. Shinji didn't know what to do.

"Misato!" He tumbled into the kitchen, finding only empty beer cans and a phone that never rang. The television played the same commercial over and over, the faucet dripped, the icemaker in the refrigerator never worked. Strange men in suits lurked just beyond the reach of the shadows. It dawned on him—the NO BAT symbol, the empty apartment, the things going on as typical routine—it was a fabricated reality! It had to be!

"No!" he screamed, suddenly having the urge to bolt from the apartment. He left his shoes back in the foyer, knowing that if this was a fabricated reality, shoes would be pointless. "No, get away!" he screamed at the shadows. Nobody heard him. They must have been too fabricated to pay attention to him, he thought.

He didn't realize he was practically flying (another side effect of reality fabrication; relative physics and variable gravity) until he almost ran smack dab into his guardian, whose purple hair stunned him so dramatically that he realized naturally purple hair was so absurd there was no possible way it could be fabricated.

"Oh Shinji, hi!" she said, precariously holding three brown paper bags. "I went to the supermarket. Care to be a gentleman?" She handed him the one slipping off of her shoulder.

"…Did you get batteries?" His uncertain question lingered in the air, dramatically.

Finally, after an eternity: "Yes, they're in the bottom of this one here."

Setting the bags down on the kitchen table, he pulled out a pack of coppertops. "Thanks," he said, and the statement chilled nobody to the bone.

---

—remembered that time inside the cockpit where there were suddenly two of her and the one was like "Oh yeah I'm the me that exists inside you when you think you aren't looking" and the other was like "Oh right uh huh like you're me of course even though I'm me and nobody else is or can ever _be_ me" but then the other one said "I am you" but then the second one above the water all clean and not submerged was all like "You are the angel" but she the other one replied with "this is loneliness" cockamamie thing to say sure but that's what she said and then the first or second or whoever one of them can't really keep 'em straight but who cares anyhow it's all a huge identity crisis and it isn't like any of these things are sane to begin with but then there was the whole infection thing and before anybody knew what was happening the whole damn cradle went up in flames KABOOM and they had to redraw the map again (which Fuyutsuki was sick and tired of doing).

---

Woke up from a reverie that came from out of nowhere. The blue sky was beyond the window, a teacher droning on in the background, hadn't even realized she spaced out.

Ikari was watching her. She could feel his eyes as they wandered up and down her innocent form, visually molesting her where the pale skin broke through the clothing, going through his own visions of what she would look like if he—

For some reason, she saw her blush in the double-reflection of the double-paned glass window. The teacher droned on.

---

"Pattern blue! It's an Angel!" Maya shouted over the unsettling silence that had permeated Central Dogma since lunch. Nobody argued with her. In fact, nobody did anything different than they did usually.

"Alright," Shigeru said, relaxing in his chair. He sighed, picked up his mug of coffee, gulped some down, scratched his scalp. A nameless tech on one of the lower levels, who will undoubtedly die when the JSSDF launches its awesome shoot-out in the Movie, coughed politely.

"Shouldn't we, uh, call somebody?" Makoto cracked his neck. "I mean, this seems like it could be pretty important." The other two bridge techs gave him weird looks, and he sank down in his chair. "But what do I know?"

But just then, the alarm sounded and gave everybody headaches.

---

The clouds looked vague, like ambiguous blorbs of water vapor suspended in the atmosphere by air currents and temperature, because that's what they were. Shinji was lying with his back on the roof of the school building, dramatic music pouring out of the loudspeaker nearby. In the back of his mind, he wondered why the dramatic music was playing, since that sort of thing only happened when there was an Angel battle taking place—the rest of the time it was boring ambient music or an obscure techno song. Mostly, though, his mind was preoccupied with coming up with more interesting analogies between his emotional and psychological state and the physical aspect of water vapor—

---

The guitars wailed as Asuka donned her plug suit and griped about having to don her plug suit. The First Child was on the other side of the locker bank, blushing over a pair of uninteresting cracked eye glasses that barely resembled the ones the Commander wore on duty. She found them on the sidewalk while aimlessly sleepwalking through the streets the previous night.

The drum set bashed incessantly with emotive blast beats as Asuka did a flying triple Lutz into the entry plug, giving several maintenance men heart attacks as she flew past them with millimeters to spare. Even with this distance, strands of her hair brushed across a man's face, slicing open his cheek, and he had to be sent to the infirmary immediately.

The bass guitarist's polyphonic solo went into extreme overdrive as the enormous Unit-02 blasted off towards the surface, striking a really dramatic kick-ass pose before whipping out its prog knife and striking an even more dramatic kick-ass pose.

The double bassist went crazy with a slide countermelody as everyone realized that it was a false alarm.

---

But it wasn't a false alarm, and Shinji Ikari realized that the clouds he was staring at were actually Angels themselves, in disguise, and it made him really depressed to know that the things that he had looked at all his life were, in actuality, enemies of mankind.

"Enemy!" he screamed, and catapulted himself down the stairwell as he made his way toward NERV—they had to be informed! Multiple synthesizers made somber organ dirges as he energetically raced toward headquarters.

---

"I will pilot it!" Shinji Ikari screamed at the techs in Central Dogma. Misato was absent, but nobody noticed. "I will pilot Eva!"

"Okay! Fine!" Shigeru threw his hands up, gesticulating wildly in dismissive motions. "Go, I don't care! Nobody's telling you not to!"

"Correct." The Commander stared down at Shinji from his balcony on high. Minutes later, Shinji was doing a back flip into the entry plug while the clarinetist dueled with the trumpeter for dominance over the high notes. The Eva rocketed toward the surface.

Shinji screamed when he discovered what he saw.

"AH!" Except it was more drawn out and dramatic than the single syllable I just wrote down.

Unit-02 was covered in water vapor, motionless, its eyes gazing blankly up at the yellow sun. The clouds seemed to be attacking her. An ominous choir sang a remixed version of the Hallelujah Chorus.

"Asuka!" He shouted. "Asuka, no!"

But alas, the effort was in vain—the clouds descended upon him, too, and the sky swallowed their existence with a solitary bite of reality distortion. There was a giant sound akin to a baseball bat smashing a man into a harpsichord, and suddenly everything was silent. Even the soundtrack stopped.

Fuyutsuki observed from Central Dogma. "This does not abide with the scenario."

Gendo agreed. "The old men must not know of this."

Meanwhile, meters below them, the techs were in an uproar, shouting things that didn't make any logical sense.

"Sir, the entry crust thermological expansion zone has been reduced by a factor of eight!" Makoto slammed his hand against his keyboard. "Randomization of frequently utilized phonetics is having no affect!"

"How is this possible?!" Shigeru yelled. "Exterior harmonics resonation is being generated by the sky's AT field!"

"It's an Angel!" Ritsuko, who I just realized was standing behind the three of them, stared at the overhead holographic projection of the sky in shock and awe.

"The sky is an Angel?!" Someone asked redundantly.

"All of that blue…" Makoto's heart fell through the floor and he suddenly felt woozy.

"This can't be right!" Maya screamed. "All readings indicate a super intelligence perpetuation machine reacting with the hypersensitive auxiliary control apparatus!"

Ritsuko glared at her. "Don't tell me—"

"Yes!" Shigeru confirmed. "Ideological forces are interacting with hypothetical realities! Soon, the borders separating the sequential order of events will break down and coherent speech will disintegrate!"

The guitars wailed with crescendo.

"Unbelievable—" Makoto hit the desk in frustration. "AT resonance is matching Unit-00!"

Misato appeared from out of nowhere. "But Unit-00 hasn't been launched yet! It's still in the docking bay!"

Fuyutsuki remained stoic. "Is this Instrumentality?"

Gendo kept his hands bridged. "It appears that the very thing we have feared is coming to pass." His enigmatic statement did nothing to move the plot along.

Shigeru continued the dramatics down below. "If AT field resonation breaches four-hundred percent, the placement of matter will become arbitrary and singular consciousnesses will begin to act independent of the timeline!" He slammed his fists into the computer screen, the breaking glass slicing open his hands. He cursed, blood flowing freely down his arms, and stared up at the holographic projections. "Incredible! The quasisymphonic resonation is reaching the terminal frequencies!"

Makoto gawked at the Commodore-64 monitor he had been working on for the entirety of the series. "No—impossible! It's happening!" He yelled in flabbergasted sputters. "Singular entities are starting to bridge the gap of linear consciousness and physical form—apparent dreams and thought patterns are taking shape—matter is no longer conservative!"

Maya screamed. "Time is ceasing its linear flow! Recognizable events no longer follow coherent order! Reality itself is unable to be defined!—"

---

Down a street—walking—one morning—a Sunday afternoon—middle of nowhere—no roads—the cicadas chirping—incessant noise—this was how it always was—had always been—will be—all along—nobody noticed—can't notice—can't see—won't see—it's all variable—reached the end—all of it—stand back from the yellow line—train's arrivin'—departin'—flat monotone—————Thank You For Riding The Tokyo-Three Loop Line; Have A Nice Day.


	2. Underground Phone of Velvet Flowers

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Neon Genesis: Evangelion, the Velvet Underground's _White Light/White Heat _nor the song "Sister Ray" off the same album, Pink Floyd's _A Collection of Great Dance Songs_, Throbbing Gristle's _20 Jazz Funk Greats_, _Blade Runner_, de Sade's _Justine_, John Coltrane's _A Love Supreme,_ Joy Division, Death. Also, I'd like to say that I don't own much of the dialogue at the end, where it's all just direct quotes or paraphrases of volume five from the Evangelion manga. Some of it's mine. One line came from the series. If you recognize it, I don't own it, basically.

**Author's Note: **This is much more coherent than chapter one. There's a reason for this. And no, it isn't a blatantly obvious reason. It probably won't make any sense until the whole thing is done anyhow.

* * *

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Underground Phone of Velvet Flowers From the Future

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Shinji held the phone in his hand. This was page sixty-five, he assured himself, of the fifth volume, and if he didn't do this now, he'd have to wait until page sixty-six, he supposed, but all the suppositions and hypothetical realities and what-ifs were things to be addressed in the last episodes, not the fifth volume. And the movie. Damn existentialism!

Who was he calling again? Oh right, that guy. Dad.

A conversation followed. You already know what it is. Look it up if you have to. Here are the important parts—the highlights, if you will:

"Do you remember what day it is tomorrow?" Shinji didn't understand why he was doing this—it wasn't quite in his character. Discontinuity between the television and the books was irrelevant, he finally decided.

"…_Tomorrow is… Rei's birthday."_ His father's voice replied with a shocking revelation.

"It—it is?" Shinji, who had been tilting his chair, slammed the front legs down and braced the tiny desk.

"_Yes."_

"Well, gee… Uh, wow." The boy rubbed the back of his neck. "I guess I should get her something neat, huh?"

"_Hmm,"_ the Commander's voice was far away, both literally and figuratively. _"I suppose you should," _he said.

"What are you getting her?"

"_I am getting her…"_ he trailed off, and the sound of a drawer being opened and rummaged around in filtered through the receiver. _"_Justine_. I am getting her this book, _Justine_."_

"What is that?" Shinji scratched his head.

"_It's a um, a book, called… _Justine_."_ He could almost hear his father shrug. _"She likes reading, and this book is thick, so I thought, well, lots of reading." _There was a pause. _"You know."_

"I don't know what she likes." Frowning, the Third Child idly played with the assorted items on his desk.

"_She likes reading."_

"Well, yeah, but, you sort of, um, you got her a book already." Shinji shrugged. "Why bother getting another book if you already get one, sort of defeats the purpose."

They were silent for a moment.

"_She likes tea."_

"Oh that's right, she does." Shinji thought for a moment.

"_But then,"_ his father's voice broke his train of thought, _"Getting tea for one's birthday... doesn't seem right. Kind of a needless gift. Something you'd give to somebody you don't particularly like, but still need to keep appearances for." _He paused. _"Uh, hang on—"_ his voice came a little thinner next, the phone held away from his mouth. _"Fuyutsuki, is that coffee? Yeah, yeah sure I'll have some—wait, decaf? Be a man! What? Oh shit. Get one of the techs up here to fix it then—correct—no—yes. Yes. Precisely. Alright. Okay. Good. No sugar. Black. No, no cream. That's what black means—I thought you were a college professor before all this. Yes, okay, fine. Thank you. I know it's hot."_

Shinji sighed, looked around, tinkered with the ballpoint pen he had been holding, drew some doodles.

"_Oh, my son's on the phone. I know, who'd have figured, right? I didn't think so either. Good coffee. Told him tomorrow was Rei's birthday. I said I told him—yes, I know. Alright then."_ The Commander cleared his throat, the receiver closer to him now. _"Alright, I'm here."_ He said.

"Does Mister Fuyutsuki know what I could get Rei?" Shinji's voice was characteristically tired.

He was silent. _"I don't know."_ His voice was far away again. _"Fuyutsuki, you have any ideas as to what to get—yeah. What? Really? Interesting."_

"What, what'd he say?"

"_Shinji,"_ his father came back on the line. _"I think you should be very straightforward with Rei," _he said.

"What?" He dropped the ballpoint pen. "What does that mean?"

"_It means…"_ he trailed off, sighed. _"Do you remember when you took the ID card to her apartment?"_

"H-how do you know about that?"

"_Surveillance cameras. Rei's place is littered with them, mostly for the live video feed installed to please all those internet voyeur junkies—"_ his tone was passive and dismissive, at best. _"—but the point remains. I think you should be very straightforward with her… she's kind of—gah! Jezus!"_

"What?! What is it?! F-father?!" he stuttered getting the word out.

"_I burned my tongue on this coffee, don't worry about it."_ He breathed deeply. _"Look, just show up at her place with some flowers and uh, hang on again—" _He yelled with the receiver away from his mouth. _"Fuyutsuki! Page the doctor, ask if Rei's on birth control yet. She is? How do you know? Oh indeed. I see. That's fine, the scenario is unchanged. Don't worry about the coffee." _He came back. _"Okay, yeah, just uh—look, something's come up; I have to go. Just show up at her place with some flowers, ask Mister Ryoji about women, and don't be shy, be bold, Rei likes that. I have to go. Don't call me again unless it's important. Don't bring roses, she hates the color red."_ This last part was all very quick and it took a little while for it to sink into Shinji's brain.

When it finally dawned on him, several pages later, the call had ended and he still hadn't quite gotten the point across.

"It's the anniversary of Mom's death," he said, realizing he was on page sixty seven, "…Dad."

---

The bridge was disturbingly silent. All three of the techs secretly wished an Angel would show up just so that they would have something to do—except Shigeru, who was busy playing his air guitar to an old Charlie Christian recording.

"So…" Makoto strained to break the silence. He looked over at Maya, sitting idly at her station, sipping coffee, waiting for an alarm to go off or the Doctor to come by and order her around. "You have plans for tonight?"

She sighed. "No, not really." Her gaze was out across the vacant holographic projection area. "Why?"

He shrugged. Shigeru jammed on behind them, unnoticed. "Just wondering."

Suddenly, the door opened, and the Third Child stood there, donned in his usual dress casual attire, the typical uncertain look etched into his features. Shigeru hit a variant E7 chord on the invisible guitar neck, hair flailing as he stabbed at the strings.

Makoto turned in his swivel chair to face the newcomer. Maya just had to turn her head a little. Shigeru paid no attention.

There was silence, except for the occasional "Bwa bwaowww…wrababadada ba bada dada dada bwaah dah doo" that the guitarist was spewing forth. Charlie Christian vocalized!

"Can we help you?" Maya's inquiry beckoned Shinji to approach.

"Um," he started, "Well," he began, "I guess," he said, "Maybe," he continued, "I don't know."

Makoto blinked. "Whatcha need?"

"Do you guys know of any, uh, great… dance tunes?" he asked, uncertainly.

Shigeru played the bop guitar, his scat speech continuing on: "Bwinga doww; dwah dwah dwah dweee dwop bwowng…"

"Great dance tunes?" Makoto looked at the tile floor. "What do you mean?"

"Yeah," Maya started to say. "Do you mean, like, swing dance? Or techno? Or like, disco or something?"

"I guess, I don't know." Shinji replied. "I was told to be, uh, bold."

Everyone blinked. Except Shigeru. "Bwah bwing ga dowee…"

"…Bold?"

He confirmed it. "Bold."

Makoto thought for a moment. "Something bold you can dance to."

"_A Love Supreme_!" Shigeru shouted, his fingers still going nuts all over the invisible guitar.

"I don't think so, Shig." Makoto rolled his eyes. "Well I guess it all depends on what kind of dance you're looking for."

"A bold one." The reply was blunt.

"A bold one…" Makoto nodded.

"It's a start," Maya stated. "Something to slow dance to?"

"I don't know how."

"I can teach you!" she blurted. Makoto raised his eyebrows. Shigeru jumped up onto his Comodore-64 console and wailed out the diminished ninths. "It's been a long time since I've danced though, so you'll have to bear with me—but it isn't that hard. If you're already familiar with music it'll be a breeze!"

"You don't have to do that…" Shinji started, but she cut him off.

"No, it isn't like I do much with my free time anyhow," she chuckled. "Besides, it'll be fun. C'mon," she said. "I'll pick you up tonight at around—"

"But Ms. Ibuki, that's not really necessary, I mean, I have somewhere to be tonight—"

Shigeru did the last couple chords as he stood precariously close to the edge of the terminal drop to the lower platform. His invisible guitar neck snapped under his awesome playing ability. He took the earphones off and jumped back down to his seat, sweat rolling down his brow.

"Hey there, Shinji. How's it going?"

"Um," he said. "I-I have to go."

As he was going, he heard Shigeru shout from behind him, "Find something by the Velvet Underground! They're good for any occasion!" The door was closed when he heard the last part shouted at him: "Or Death! The band!"

---

"Hey there kid, what can I do ya for?" The man behind the counter looked sort of intimidating, but he was mostly harmless.

Shinji stared. "I'm just looking around, really. I guess." The record store was expansive, but hardly huge. The selection was admirable, though he didn't have a clue what to get. "Actually," he turned back to the man. "Do you have any Velvet Underground?"

"'Course we do," he said, walking towards the back of the store. "Lookin' for their earlier stuff, live stuff, later stuff, what?"

"I uh, I don't know. Somebody recommended them to me."

"Alright," the man sighed. "Well, their live stuff is pretty good if you can stand the recording quality. Personally, I think _Loaded_ was crap, but most of their radio songs came off that album at the time." He searched through a shelf, album covers flicking by, the sound of plastic jewel cases hitting each other resounding in the store. "Ah, here we are."

"What's that?"

"Cutting edge stuff," he said. "The real Avant-Garde."

"To be honest," Shinji said, following him to the counter, "I'm really just looking for something to dance to."

The man stopped. "Dance to?" He looked down at the jewel case in his hand, glossy black cover art staring him back in the face. "Well, I guess you _could _dance to 'Sister Ray', but I've never really thought about it. It's more something to just… take in and experience." He made a funny face and looked at Shinji. "Somebody recommended them to you, you say?" He asked.

"Yeah." He shrugged. "The guy told me Velvet uh, Underground was perfect for any occasion."

The man put the CD back on the shelf. "Here, if you want something to dance to, just take this," he picked up an album with a couple in a pose, with ropes tying them to the ground, in the middle of a field. "Either this, or Throbbing Gristle's _20 Jazz Funk Greats._ Different kind of dance beat, but hey, it works I guess."

"What is that?" Shinji motioned to the album in the man's hands.

"Pink Floyd. They grabbed a bunch of danceable tunes and threw 'em on a single album." He sighed as he reached the counter. "Don't know if you really can dance to them, though. Never tried. In fact, I don't even know of anyone who's tried." He punched a few keys on the register. "Did you want that Throbbing Gristle stuff?"

Shinji's phone rang. "Uh, hold on…" he turned away and answered the device. "Hello?"

"_Shinji."_

"F-father?!"

"_Don't buy the Throbbing Gristle album. You can copy it from my personal collection."_

"W-what?"

"_I have to go. Don't call me unless it's important."_

"I-I don't understand." But the phone call had ended.

"You want this or not, kid?" The man held _20 Jazz Funk Greats_ in his hands, waved it about a little bit, the light reflecting off the jewel case and blinding the boy.

"Um," he considered, reflections flying through and piercing his retina, "…no; thanks though."

The man rolled his eyes and shrugged. "Whatever."

---

It was barely noon, and he should be at school. If Misato found out that he was skipping school to buy CDs, she'd probably scold him. And if she found out that he was skipping school to find something for Ayanami's birthday, he'd never hear the end of her teasing. Neither option seemed very pleasing.

But now what? He had a CD. He had the recommendations of dancing with Rei. He still needed something to play the CD with—no one he knew owned a CD player. He had never even _seen_ a CD player, except on television.

His phone rang.

"Hello?"

"_Shinji! How's it going?"_

"Kaji?" Shinji made a face of confusion. "I'm, uh, good, I guess."

"_Same old, huh?" _The voice was lighthearted, but still masked with a certain gloominess that perpetually hung around the older man.

"Yeah, I suppose."

"_Well hey; I just heard you bought a CD!"_

"You did?" Shinji looked around, nervously. The streets were empty. Some birds gathered on the power lines overhead. "How'd you find that out?"

"_Oh Shinji,"_ the disembodied voice of Kaji said. _"Don't worry about it. Look, I've got some equipment at my place that can copy that music to tape—so it'll play in your run-of-the-mill boom box!" _Kaji sounded overjoyed, for some reason. _"Isn't that fantastic?!"_

"Um, I guess…" Shinji wasn't quite catching up on the man's ecstatic spontaneity.

Kaji continued: _"If you want to use it, you know where I live."_

"I do?" It was news to him.

"_Think, Shinji. Think about the time I took you to the aquarium."_

"But that shouldn't have even happened yet!" Shinji sputtered out. "That doesn't occur until the end of the volume!"

"_Doesn't matter,"_ Kaji reassured him. _"It's all relative."_

Shinji was dumbfounded. "How can I see into the future to know where you live if—"

"_You remembered the aquarium—an event you claimed hasn't happened yet."_ Kaji had him there. _"Just think a little harder, and you'll remember information you don't even know about. Besides,"_ he said, _"it's all in the plot anyhow."_

Shinji blinked. "32nd West Street, right? Apartment 244."

"_That's how it's done! See? You've already got the hang of it."_ Kaji chuckled through the receiver. _"Come on over. The equipment is all set up." _

---

The door to apartment 244 stood like a gravestone, but it opened up quickly, revealing Kaji in a blue button down shirt, khakis; his standard issue pistol poised at the ready.

"Where you followed?" he asked.

Shinji gave him a stern look. "Shouldn't you know already?"

Kaji frowned, beckoning the kid inside. "You're right." Before closing the door, he still took a cautionary look around.

The apartment was very dark.

"Um," Shinji started. "I brought the CDs—this Pink Floyd thing, and my father express mailed this other one. It was really weird," he said, "he called me up while I was in the record store, told me not to buy it and that I could just copy it from his collection and the next thing I know—"

"You walked outside and the mailman's holding a package for you? Opened it up and there's the CD?" Kaji lit up a cigarette as he strolled into the kitchen that looked remarkably like the one in _Blade Runner_.

Shinji noded, confusion apparent. "Yeah, how did you—"

"Don't worry," he said, voice hoarse. "It happens all the time. Memories and mysteries, more questions than answers, the moment you solve a puzzle, fifteen more pop up, like trying to dry the ocean with nothing but a handkerchief and a dry sense of humor."

Shinji was silent. "I just wanted to use—"

"The tape recorder, I know." Kaji nodded toward the other room, an enormous stereo system encompassing an entire wall. "It's pretty intuitive. Plop the CD into one of the players, stick a tape into the tape deck, hit play/record button…" he sucked on his cigarette, let out a breath.

"Is something—"

"Wrong?" Smoke poured out of his lips. "No, just tired. In this business, you're always running low on fuel, the tread on the tires is always thin, the road of life throwing every pothole in your direction and your chassis is being held together by cheap tobacco and a bottle of eighty-proof that hits you like a fifty caliber slug in the back of your throat."

The Third Child was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the strange talk. "Well, I'm just going to—"

"Go make your tape?" Kaji blinked at the guest, nodding, waving smoke around with his hand. "Sure go ahead—"

Shinji couldn't help but get flustered. "Alright, this is getting really—"

"Annoying? I agree." Kaji walked into the stereo-dominated room. "You know what to do," he said. "Don't worry, even though I know what you're going to say, I'll stop finishing all of your sentences if you stop talking."

---

"I need some blue flowers." Shinji stared at the pimple-faced youth behind the counter of the convenience store. He knew he could get flowers here because he thought really hard about where he went to get flowers, and this store came to mind. He'd never been here in his entire life, but he recognized it immediately.

The other boy stared back at him. "What kind?"

He knew the boy would ask this question. "Blue," Shinji replied.

"Just… blue?"

Shinji nodded.

"Like, you don't care what type or whatever?"

Shinji shook his head.

"So I could give you anything as long as it was blue?"

"As long as it was a blue flower, no, I probably wouldn't care." Shinji confirmed.

After a few minutes of scrounging, the boy returned with a mediocre-looking arrangement. Shinji received plus five experience points as he paid the kid.

---

The corridor was stereotypically dilapidated.

He knocked a few times, the metal door cold against his knuckles. Shinji kept in mind what his father had said; in one hand was a bouquet of blue flowers, the other held onto the handle of an early-nineteen-nineties-esque boom box.

He had to find a reason to be here, pronto.

Happy Birthday? It sounded lame. He kind of felt lame. But then, who else would stand in the middle of a nearly abandoned apartment complex with a bouquet of flowers and a boom box?

The door opened. "Hello?" It was Fuyutsuki.

"S-Sub Commander?" He almost felt his eyes come out of his head.

The elderly man frowned, uncertainly. "…Pilot."

There was a long, awkward silence.

"Why…" Shinji started to speak, but trailed off. "Why," he began again, "if you don't mind my asking, why are you in R—Ayanami's—apartment?"

Fuyutsuki frowned, stepped out into the hallway, and looked up toward the number above his apartment door. "Shinji," he said, the boy following his gaze, "This is my apartment. Apartment eight zero two."

Shinji paled.

"You're four floors off."

Shinji stared at the flowers in his hand.

"Haven't you been to her apartment before?"

Shinji blushed.

Fuyutsuki sighed and stepped back into his apartment. "Um," he said, pausing before he shut the door. He tried to think of encouraging words. "Good luck…? With Ayanami, I mean." He eyed the boom box on the floor strangely as the door swung shut.

---

He triple checked the apartment number, the boom box again sitting disgruntled on the ramshackle floor. The metal again felt cool against his knuckles. The lump in his throat again attributed to his nervousness and uncertainty.

The door creaked as the inside handle turned. It opened a little, a very tired Rei Ayanami peeking her head out. "Hello," she whispered in a drawl. "The synch test…" she trailed off. "It ran late."

Shinji stood there.

She didn't have any pants on. No skirt, no pants, no shorts, nothing. Just a long, button down shirt that barley reached her thighs.

She looked up at him. He tore his gaze from her gloriously smooth, milky-white thighs to look at her face, and tried to think of something to say.

"It's uh, eight o'clock." He whispered. "At night."

"Oh, I see." She said.

He realized that she was staring at the flowers.

"These, uh, these are for you." He said suddenly, extending them towards her.

And again, she was looking into his eyeballs. "Why don't you come in?"

---

She was the one who had found the vase, filled it with water, and set it on the table. She was the one who took the mystery flowers out of the paper stuff they wrapped them in and managed to fit the stems into the vase. She was the one who gazed at them idly, while he uttered "it matches the room," in a redundant manner.

He was the one who set the boom box on the counter and fished around for the tape he'd made at Kaji's, pausing for a few moments at a time as he pondered the buttons and controls on the machine. He almost tipped over a pitcher of iced tea when he tried to open the cassette deck—

_She said, "No, you shouldn't do that. Don't you know you'll stain the—"_

—but, with a terrible noise, the machine started working again. The cassette went in. And Shinji was informed that he had been gypped.

Rei pressed her near-naked self up against his back while he tinkered with the boom box. "You bought a Pink Floyd album, but it was really _White Light/White Heat_," she whispered, breath hot against his ear.

"What?" he asked absently, still pushing a few buttons just because.

"The store manager was a crook," she crooned, "and replaced all the music in the store with assorted Velvet Underground albums."

"I don't understand," he said, scratching his head.

A pale hand snaked up his hip and ruffled the front of his shirt. "You don't need to."

They made out until dawn, and the tape somehow rewound itself and played again several times, so the Velvet Underground never stopped.

---

Shinji cracked his neck as he stumbled down the steps of the public bus. Grasping the side of the bus station shelter for support, he regained his balance and looked around. This _was _the right stop after all.

His unkempt hair ruffled as the bus passed on, the wrinkles in his shirt smoothing out as the shirt billowed in the wind. He wasn't wearing any underwear or socks, and his shoes felt weird without the sock fuzz in between his toes. He heard _A Love Supreme_ playing on the loudspeakers.

Shinji paused as he started to enter the cemetery. He wondered if he was forgetting something, but shrugged it off as the gates got farther and farther behind him.

"Dad…" He called to the figure by the marker of the fake grave.

The figure turned. "Shinji."

"I… I can't believe it," Shinji exclaimed. "I did what you said, and… it was amazing."

Gendo remained silent, a hand shoved in the pocket of his trousers.

"I never thought you knew so much about… all that stuff." He scratched the back of his head, stared down at the ground.

"It's all for show," the Commander replied.

"What do you mean? None of this is happening?"

The elder Ikari nodded. "You can see me and touch me, but there's nobody here." He sighed, staring up at the sky. "In the mind… that's where it's all happening."

"It—it is?"

"…No." Gendo replied. "I was… fooling you, there."

They were silent for a long time.

"How come I can see into the future?" Shinji asked.

"We screwed up, somewhere along the way."

"You… threw them all away, didn't you? All the key events," The boy started to think as if he was beginning to understand. "That's why it's all messed up. Somehow, the timeline and—and the whole cohesion between events stuff—and—you threw it all away—"

"Everything I have is kept in my heart." Gendo's statement was solid as rock.

They lapsed into silence again.

"She liked the Velvet Underground," Shinji whispered. "She wanted to… she wanted to form a cover band, she said." When his father didn't reply, he continued. "We could pull from the techs… that long haired guy, he could be like, the guitar player. You could be on drums, if you wanted…" A breeze dramatically tossed his already tousled hair around. "Or bass. And Rei would… well, she never got around to explaining how it would all work out."

"Don't try to think we can understand them," Gendo stated. "Don't try to think we can… _be_ the Velvet Underground. For some reason, people think they can do that. Remember that they can't. Never completely. Never enough."

To punctuate his statement, a nearby loudspeaker played Joy Division's cover of "Sister Ray".

"We are acting obscenely out of character," commented the Commander.

Shinji nodded solemnly. "It isn't quite fixed, is it?"

Kaji drew smoke from his cigarette, and the cemetery wasn't anywhere to be found. "I doubt it will be," he commented, neon from the glowing signs illuminating a silhouette. "But there's always hope."

Shinji blinked, and his father was the Commander again. The cemetery reappeared. A bus crashed through the gates, cart wheeled, burst into flames, settled behind the pair. Joy Division played on, oblivious.

"It's time," the Commander said. "I'm leaving," the Commander continued. Pretend those commas were periods, like they are in real life.

Shinji spotted Rei sitting in one of the passenger chairs, body all burnt up and singed, smoke pouring out of the broken window by her bloodied, charred head.

"And don't worry," Gendo said, over his shoulder. "She'll be fine. We have clones. This one just got… burnt a little."

So passed page seventy-eight, with a needless tie-in to page fifty-seven, but at least this scene made it onto the front cover. Or some variant of it. Somewhere. Somehow. Fade out, roll credits, scene change, cut, edit, fold-in, Tangier style. It's nothing to fret over.


	3. Universal Virgin Multitrack Recording

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Neon Genesis: Evangelion, nor its blasphemous manga adaptation 'Angelic Days', Coca Cola, Peter Gabriel lyrics (good luck spotting them, but I gotta include the disclaimer), nor anything else I might have missed. Surprisingly little product placement or obscure references, but then again, surprisingly little actually happens in this chapter.

**Author's Note:** The third chapter, written in two stretches; both spanning about five hours, counting procrastination, phone calls, and mild disinterest, and ultimate dissatisfaction. After rereading it, I realized that nothing has actually been accomplished. Overall, the plot is advanced, and it sort of sets the stage for what's to come, but really… not a whole lot happens. So much for micro-plots.

* * *

—found out that that she was a CLONE!!!!!!!!!(happens not quite yet)

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Universal Virgin Multitrack Recording Feedback

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Shinji Ikari did not know what to do now. Everything had fallen apart. Nothing was together anymore. It was all in pieces. His life had disintegrated about the seams. Dismantled. He felt like someone had taken his life, and deconstructed it, and refused to put it back together again, so he had to lay there with his disassembled life on the metaphorical carpet of eternity, since god knew he couldn't figure out how to put his life back together.

So he sat there, disgruntled, staring at the machine that gave NERV life. It had just malfunctioned, spewing its blood-like, scalding-hot liquid of life all over the linoleum, drenching the cluster of techs that were busily trying to repair the thing, even while it was still gasping for life. Steam rose up out of the belly of the beast, brown ooze coughing up and splattering the various uniforms, prompting a colorful variety of curses… Eventually, somebody decided to reach for the plug to turn the damn thing off.

"Finally," someone gasped.

"The pulses have stopped… synch ratio zero… no responses…" someone leaned against the refrigerator and breathed a heavy sigh.

"Target has gone silent," someone whispered.

Misato rubbed the bridge of her nose. "It's just a coffee maker," she said. "This kind of thing happens all the time—if we keep making a big deal out of this—"

"Damnit woman, we need to be _prepared_!" Shigeru clenched his fist. "You're right that this kind of thing happens a lot—but what if it _didn't_?" he whispered. "What if it worked all the time, all fine-de-do-dah, and we had no trouble with it, until it suddenly decided to quit on us in the midst of _hell_ itself?! We'd be stranded, that's what would happen! We'd be stranded, and the _machine_ would be to blame!"

"Hopelessly lost!" Makoto echoed.

"We need to make a big deal out of this," Shigeru continued, "so that we can continue to recognize the sanity from that which lies just out of reach…" He gazed off into the patch of infinity that sat itself next to Misato's shoulder.

"Your drills are costing this organization valuable time," her tone terse, her arms crossed, her breasts pushed up between her arms. "If you don't get your act together, we may just have to redesign how this place is run."

Doctor Ritsuko Akagi entered the scene. "Attention." She waited until everyone looked at her. Except Shinji, because he was too busy being introspective about his failure at… life, I guess. "This coffee maker has to go."

The statement was met with great disapproval.

"What the fuck, man?" Makoto gesticulated dramatically.

"This is cause for a mutiny," Shigeru vowed.

"Please," Maya, who I just realized was there as well, uttered distraught with clenched fists close to her chest. "Please," she said again, against the uproar, "we can't fight each other like this. It's exactly what they want us to do—tear ourselves apart. We're tearing ourselves apart! Can't you see that's what they want us to do? We can't let that happen—we can't tear ourselves apart like this, because, because, because that's what they want us to do! We can't—" tears dramatically poured down her desolate face. "We can't… don't…" No one could hear her as they screamed at the Doctor, loaded their side arms as the guards came in to escort the coffee maker out, plotted revenge. "Somebody stop this slaughter!"

"They can't get away with this!"

"We won't let you get away with this!"

"Someone will pay… with blood! Or they can reimburse us with a better 401K plan, because ours sucks! I can't retire on those pennies!"

"And a dental plan! Or at least health coverage that covers floss!"

"Yeah!—wait." Shigeru glanced at Makoto, who had uttered the previous statement. "Floss?"

Makoto nodded. "Uh, yeah," he said. "Floss. I go through, like, a lot. It eats into my grocery bills, sometimes."

"What, do you stockpile the stuff, or something?"

"Well, no. I use it to make scale models of stuff." He started using his hands. "I figured out how to make little guys out of pieces of toothpicks and Q-tips, and like, buildings and stuff I can fashion out of cardboard and other objects. A little paint here and there… I use the floss for rope or bandages—hey, this one time I made up this Egyptian themed set, and I wrapped the floss around a few dudes and had neat-looking minty mummies."

Everyone in the room blinked. Except the guards. And Shinji.

"What?" Makoto asked, indignant. "I have to have something to do on weekends. Not like any of you people care anyhow."

"That's true," Shigeru agreed.

Misato returned to the root of the matter. "…It's just a coffee maker."

"Not anymore it isn't!" Ritsuko shot her down. "In fact, it isn't even in this room any longer, since you people keep digressing and going into unnecessary monologues." She sighed, center stage. "I _was_ going to tell you what this new contraption is," she motioned to the device that stood in place of the old dying coffee machine. It had the word DEVICE written on it in enormous white capital English letters. "And… I still am. Momentarily." She paused to let the intensity of the situation build up—whether it was annoyance or apprehension, no one was sure.

"It is… the DEVICE." She bellowed.

"...The DEVICE." They all repeated, in utter awe and amazement.

"My life is in shambles…" Shinji Ikari muttered underneath the din of all the people crooning over the new DEVICE that stood in place of the coffee maker. No one heard him. Or cared.

The DEVICE stood stoic like a steel pantheon of singular existence, a monolith of individual mechanic being; the verification of the verisimilitude of its own perpetual continuation, a memorial to the past it had witnessed, a shout of defiance toward the future that loomed before it. Note the semicolon.

---

Days passed. The DEVICE was stoic in its place in the hovel of allotted recreational beverage consumption. No one understood its existence, but nevertheless, it persevered through the hardships of being an inanimate object. Its ON switch had yet to be switched, so it sat, inactivated, inactive, dead.

---

In the days that followed, little of any interest happened. Shinji's life was still, as he saw it, in shambles. The second Rei still had not accepted his advances to the school social thingamajig that was supposed to happen come Friday. Kaji was off on assignment someplace. Misato was calling Kaji an idiot and constantly crying herself to sleep in a drunken fit every night. School continued be a drag. None of his friendships were fulfilling, and continued to stagnate. Toji was still dead.

Oh, and his father was still some icy, secluded, far away figure that hadn't gotten around to raising him yet.

---

Rei, on the other hand, had found her life becoming exceedingly eventful. Not only had the synch tests been rescheduled, but the teacher had started assigning more homework due to the approaching final exams that loomed—which she continued to ignore and toss in the waste basket on her way out of each class.

And to top it all off, the Third Child was acting weird, and that was always cause for some fashion of amusement.

Just the other day, in fact, he seemed to have the obsession of walking her home, constantly clearing his throat and looking around, obviously perturbed by the silence that reigned supreme between the two, yet ignorant of a way to break it. There was a reason the Commander had advised her to keep her distance from this one; he was socially inept and afraid of himself.

And then there was the naked synch test day.

She said it aloud: "Naked."

And the "let's guess what the mystery meat is today!" cafeteria grab bag at NERV the day after.

She said it aloud: "Mysterious."

And there was an angel attack in there somewhere as well, but she had forgotten exactly what happened and when, since it's only importance was the fact that the Committee was one step closer to Instrumentality.

She said it aloud: "Whoop-de-do."

"Rei?" The one woman that ordered them around all the time stopped her in the hallway. "Are you talking to yourself?"

Rei knew that her gaze unsettled most people. She found that amusing. "No, Major." She set that unsettling gaze upon the purple-haired woman with the short skirt and long jacket.

She almost said it aloud: Skirt.

The Major blinked, shivered, felt goose bumps on the back of her neck, had the absurd idle thought that she was being watched by a mysterious third party, was struck by the notion that she was but a tiny part of the bigger whole, and started walking once more. "Oh, I'm sorry. Sometimes I just get so caught up in things…" she continued, but since she was walking away from Rei, her words trailed off into nothingness. Rei paid it no heed.

She said it aloud: "Heed."

She found these words secretly amusing.

---

Kaji examined the DEVICE with a keen eye. It was remarkably unremarkable (which just further proved its status as a conundrum), and ever since its arrival, the folk of NERV had been acting a tad stranger than usual. Shigeru had taken to actually playing his guitar at work, rather than the air guitar he always had with him. Mokoto would go into sudden fits of screaming and pounding on the controls, but all it took was the Major to be in the room and he'd calm down. Maya had the tendency to lick Doctor Akagi when she thought no one was looking, but as far as Kaji knew, she might have been doing that before this whole DEVICE fiasco. And Fuyutsuki… he started standing on his head a little more often.

He had no proof of this, but he was starting to think that the DEVICE had stolen all of the Finger-O-Peanut bars out of the vending machine next to it. He didn't know how it could do such a thing, but it couldn't be coincidence that the DEVICE had been placed right next to the Finger-O-Peanut dispenser.

Kaji stood up and scratched his head. There was something most defiantly amiss here, and he'd be damned if the truth escaped him. Again.

---

Shinji was busy not paying attention in class to realize that the teacher was droning on about how all of their lives were meaningless flashes in the pan, how they were constantly televised, trapped in a routine doomed to repeat itself, perforated with commercial breaks, and ultimately damned to the fronts and backs of DVDs made to be sold to pathetic losers that have no lives and will ultimately end up using all of the characters _again_ to write meaningless stories to further warp their already messed up psyches. No, Shinji had better things to do than to listen to the old fart.

Like stare at Rei.

Who stared back.

And then he got an invitation to the secret chat room that everyone in the class knew about, but he ignored it, and subsequently fell asleep.

AND WAS SUCKED INTO ANOTHER WORLD!!!!!!!

---

Shinji regained consciousness in a place surrounded by blackness. Even though there was nothing to look at, he couldn't help but feel as though there were a fisheye lens attached to his head, and that he was seeing a really distorted image of what was actually there. Even if there was nothing there. He couldn't help but feel distorted. In his… nothingness.

He had always been easily motivated into motion sickness. So, closing his eyes, he sat back down at fell asleep. And yet, Shinji still couldn't shake the smell of blood, or the feeling that he was inside Eva. But that thought was passing and idle, and he paid it no heed whatsoever.

He was about to say something, but the nothingness seemed to constrict and contort slightly, and the next thing he knew, he was spat out like a Shinji Ikari stub of chewing tobacco and landed on the sidewalk outside of his school.

Where he collided with Rei.

Who was dressed strangely.

And wore white panties striped with pink.

"Wait a minute, I know this place," was the first thought that entered his brain. The second was something along the lines of "She's pretty in pink."

"You saw!" The weird Rei glared at him.

"What?"

"You saw, didn't you?!"

"Saw what?"

A conversation ensued, and if you really want to, you can look it up for yourself. Just watch episode, what, twenty-six, right? Or you can go out and waste nine bucks American for the embarrassment AU manga that I never should have bought.

---

"Hello, Rei." Kaji waved from his spot behind the DEVICE. His upper torso was currently lodged behind the machine, his hands busy with wires or something, his feet splayed out across the linoleum floor. It looked as if he hadn't changed his clothes in a day or two.

Rei blinked at the man.

"What brings—umph—you here?" He yanked at something and let out a groan as he did so.

"I require your assistance in something," she all but whispered. "It involves the Third Child."

"The Third Child—ow," she watched his torso move a little, and then a clunk resonated, followed by Kaji's quiet cursing. "Shit." His head was made visible as he moved out from behind the DEVICE. "You mean Shinji?" he asked, then frowned, then looked at her again. "Didn't he do that whole, ah, whatsit, dance thing? With the boom box and the flowers?"

Rei regarded him with disinterest verging on mild curiosity.

"No, huh?" He frowned. "That's weird, I wonder where that memory came from." He shrugged and sighed. "So what's this about the Third Child you need assistance with? If you're asking for tips on how to show some skin or get him shacked up with you, I'd ask Katsuragi or the Doc."

"I am having difficulty locating him."

Kaji blinked, literally eating his words. "Where is he?"

Rei blinked. "I do not know," she said, calmly, as she is often apt to do. "I have had one of the techs checked the Section-2 reports, which verify what I saw."

"And what… did you see?"

"The Third Child sank into a Dirac Sea while in Science Class."

Kaji stared at her, long and hard. He suddenly had the overwhelming urge to retrieve a cigarette from his jacket—which was currently hung over the back of the bench that Rei stood in front of.

"I… see," he said, slowly. He scratched his head.

She almost said it aloud: Head.

"Have you, uh, talked to the Commander yet? Or Rit—uh—the Doctor?" He stood up and rubbed the bruise on the back of his head, where he slammed it into something behind the DEVICE. "Anyone? They should be notified about this kind of… situation."

She nodded calmly. "They appeared uninterested."

"Hmm," Kaji nodded, this time rubbing his manly, unshaven, rugged, five o'clock shadow. Chicks dig that. "I suppose we should consult the Sub Commander. He always came off as a tad more approachable than Ikari… but just as self obsessed."

And so they did!

---

"He has… disappeared, you say?" Fuyutsuki popped open some delicious Coca-Cola, poured it into a glass, letting it trickle down the inside of the glass rather than dumping it straight onto the ice, since that excites it to the point of approaching flatness to soon, and detracts from the taste. "That's interesting," he continued, watching the bubbles jump up and down, the fizz at the top of the glass and slowly retracting back toward the liquid.

Kaji played with a few objects that had accumulated on the numerous shelves that cluttered the Sub Commander's office. "That's all you can say?"

Fuyutsuki shrugged. "What do you want me to say?" He asked. "I mean, we don't even have the slightest idea of what a Dirac Sea even _is_, never mind how to retrieve someone or something out of one." He sighed, drank some Coke. "Look at what we were going to do with the Twelfth. Drop a bunch of bombs, try and nuke its ass to hell. Fat lot of good that did us—by some unspecified self-realizing epiphany, Shinji came out of that one on his own, all existentialist style." He gazed out his window for a little bit. "I've forgotten; have we fought the Twelfth, yet?"

Kaji scratched his head. "I think so." He frowned. "That means I'll be dead soon. Shit."

Rei checked her watch, which had hitherto gone unnoticed. She bought it earlier that morning. "The fourteenth arrives tomorrow," she said.

Fuyutsuki drank more soda. It fizzed. "Oh," he said.

And there was an uncomfortable silence.

---

Ritsuko adjusted her skirt, buttoned her blouse, slid her stockings back on, tried to comb her hair with her fingers, took the brush offered by the man who just pounded her brains out, reapplied her lip gloss, used saliva to wash off the lipstick marks she left on the side of his face, slid her feet into her shoes, stared out the window of the office at the geofront, idly wanted a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

"Lieutenant Ibuki is attracted to you," the Commander's voice next to her ear informed her of the obvious.

"Jealous much?" she asked, dripping with more than just sarcasm.

"You should invite her next time."

She ran a hand through her dyed hair, noticed the roots showing in her reflection in the wall of glass. "I don't think she'll be too fond of you."

"Videotape, then."

"Videotape." She nodded absently.

Minutes passed. Neither said anything.

"What do we do about the Third?" She suddenly decided to ask.

He shrugged. "We both know where he is," he said. "And we both know he'll show up again before the arrival of the Fourteenth. Says so in the script—scrolls." He corrected himself a tad too late.

"I… see." She sighed out of the mutual absence of self fulfillment.

---

Rei left the office to attend to her own musings. Kaji, on the other hand, stuck around.

"Didn't we have another pilot?" he asked.

Fuyutsuki gazed at the ice cubes at the bottom of his otherwise empty glass. He shrugged. "I don't remember," he said, stopped, thought, continued, "I don't recall."

Kaji found a tennis ball underneath the ex-professor's desk, tossed it against the windows. "My friends would think I was a nut."

"Don't… don't do that," the older man protested, weakly. "The window might break."

The one with the ponytail looked at him. "These windows are bulletproof," he replied.

"Oh, I hadn't realized."

And the climax remained ever elusive once again.

---

"Do you know what's going on?" Asked Makoto to Shigeru.

"No, I don't," Shigeru said. "I just hope it all repairs itself soon, or this whole story is screwed."

And Maya remained in the background, yet again.

---

With a great horrid sound, the DEVICE opened up and vomited out Shinji Ikari, the Third Child. He washed out onto the floor, naked, covered in LCL, shocked, repulsed, twitching, shaking, cold, confused, and thirsty for a glass of water.

Rei stared at him as he hastily covered his privates.

He realized it was her presence he noticed, and stared at her. "Rei!" he exclaimed. "It was amazing!" he breathed. "I've never been to a place so… wonderful."

The DEVICE shut, and poofed out of existence thanks to a convenient plot hole.

Her brow clenched in confusion. The irony of the situation also did not go unnoticed (Note: see Episode Five!), however naked Shinji Ikaris were not the stuff dreams were made of. At least, not hers. "What do you mean?"

"Well—it was really cool," he started, standing up, forgetting his nakedness for a moment, "Like, my dad wasn't such a distant bastard, and Toji was still alive, and so was Mom, and she was really cool, and caring, like I'd always imagined her to be, and everyone we know, like Hikari and Kensuke, they weren't just friends with us because we were Eva pilots, and Asuka totally didn't have the whack personality flaws she's got now, and she was normal, and you weren't some icy isolationist bitch but a totally approachable bubbly schoolgirl who had this fascination with clinging to me and it was really great!" he breathed. "Can I have some water? I'm, uh, really thirsty."

Rei gazed at him. LCL dripped off of him. "Isolationist bitch?"

He blinked. "Well, yeah, I mean… the way you are now. All distant. And unapproachable."

"And you'd prefer that I was giddy and clung to you all the time?" Her face was unreadable.

"Uh, well, I don't know. Maybe not so distant…" he was visibly uncomfortable. "Can you let me buy you ice cream sometime?"

She was silent. Finally, "Who is Asuka?"

"Oh that's right, she doesn't exist here." He shrugged. "This place is out of whack anyhow, so it doesn't matter. Just wait until the end."

She turned away and started out of the break hovel.

He called after her. "Hey, what about that ice cream?"

"The answer is no, Ikari." She said, departing.

"Oh." She was gone. He was alone, thirsty, and naked.

Maya Ibuki walked in, hungry for some Finger-O-Peanut, but got a little more than she had anticipated. "What the—?"

Shinji felt the blood drain from his face.

---

The first thing Kaji noticed upon his arrival to the scene was that the DEVICE was missing. The second thing he noticed was a dripping Shinji Ikari, standing in a puddle of LCL, and a motionless Lieutenant Ibuki occupying the other end of the room, staring.

"Am I… interrupting anything?" he asked.

Shinji lapsed into unconsciousness and fell over.

Maya sat down, breathless. "He—he was just like that, when I came in," Maya whispered. "No warning, no, uh, nothing on." She ran her fingers through her hair as Kaji kneeled down in front of her. "I'm just a minor character," she uttered. "I'm not supposed to deal with—with—naked—teenagers!" She reached for her sidearm.

"Hey, that's a little drastic," Kaji put his hands up. "You don't need to shoot the boy. For all we know, he was dumped there by supernatural forces beyond his control."

"Sorry, sorry, sorry. I know, it's just, sometimes, I overreact." She got up and paced. "I can't handle stress," she said. "It's like, all this stuff just comes down on my head at once, a huge weight on my shoulders, and I mean—the Doctor doesn't care, I'm just her little errand bitch, 'hey, go get me some coffee,' or, 'hey, go get me some cigarettes'—it gets _really _aggravating sometimes, knowing that she only keeps you around as eye candy and doesn't appreciate the fact that you got a _doctorate_ in your field and you're only twenty-four years old. I got a doctorate! I should be _teaching_. I'm a computer scientist, for chrissake, who can program circles around the people that I'm supposed to be working with. But all they do is argue about old music—one of them air guitars on top of his own workstation, and the other just stares at the Major's chest all day, and like, what, that makes _me_ feel really happy about _myself_, knowing that whenever she's around I'm just some nerdy tech bitch, who has a doctorate—I'm still a _virgin_, because of that damn doctorate, and I don't even have anything to show for it! A virgin!"

He didn't think about it, but he said it anyhow. "I can fix that."

Her rant smashed into a wall and exploded in a subdued quiet. Her gaze was contemplative, and the silence was thick and full.

The refrigerator that kept the sodas in the vending machine cold started running, making an irritating 'BWUHRRRRRRRRR' sound that gradually changed do a 'WRUAHHHHHHHH' noise as it kicked into life.

"Are you serious?"

Kaji shrugged. "Sure."

She nodded. "How about, uh, tonight, then?"

"Want dinner?"

"Sure."

"Okay." He nodded.

"Okay." She nodded. Again. They were silent. Again. "I guess I'll… see you then." She awkwardly made her way out of the lounge as Kaji nodded.

"Yep."

He sighed and looked around. Katsuragi would kill him if she ever found out, but she probably never would. Besides, he'll be dead soon; 'bout a month to go.

Shinji coughed and sputtered, sat up.

"Mister Kaji?" He looked at the man who was lounging against the bench.

The man looked back. "Hey there, Shinji." He tossed the boy a tuxedo. "You should get some clothes on."

"Wow, thanks Mister Kaji. Where'd you get this tuxedo?" The man shrugged nonchalantly as the Third Child climbed into it.

"Go with it," he said, approaching the coffee machine had never actually been replaced by the DEVICE at all. "Can I buy you a drink?"

"Uh, Kaji..." Shinji looked up at him. "I'm a guy."


	4. The Interlude In This Chapter Is Awesome

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Neon Genesis: Evangelion, or anything related to it. I don't own David Bowie, either. Naufana and Ghadis or creations of William S. Burroughs, and don't belong to me. I also do not own any of the coffee companies mentioned by name; Maxwell House, Folgers, Chock full o'Nuts, Yuban, et al.

**Author's Note: **This whole chapter is practically an author's note interspersed with characters and reasonably coherent narrative. I'm not even going to bother with an official one.

* * *

HAPPY FUN TIME SUPER NEAT-O DOUBLE HOUR DELUXE WHAMMY FEATURE (UP ON BILLBOARD HIGH) 

---------------------------------------------

Today was the first time that the sun rose in the morning, reached its peak at noon, and descended below the horizon come evening. It was also the first day where all the clocks ran forward, not backward, in synchronization, and all the digital readings read the same number wherever you went, and subsequently changed to the next number in sequence—in sync. Today was the first day, it would be appropriate to assume, that all of the little quirks of nature that most people tend overlook were finally straightened out. Time was back on schedule.

Here, anyway.

And 'here' just happens to be where I am not, but where Shinji is, and _that_ happens to be trapped inside the black-and-white-and-sometimes-watercolored-which-looks-ugly-in-black-and-white panels of a shitty AU manga that (I stress _again_ I never should have bought) currently resides in the other room on a dusty shelf I'm probably going to have to disturb to read the damn volume I regretfully own just to get the action straight for this one. And by "one" I mean "chapter". And by "action", I… don't know what I mean.

Scratch that. I just reread that tankobon—and it sucked. This universe I'm referring to is a universe that vaguely resembles that one, but it isn't that one entirely, which means I'm totally pulling this out of my ass at this point. What else is new?

Or perhaps I'm lying, and all of this just takes place in an entirely random omniversal, omnidimensional location.

But at least the title sequences didn't get fucked up.

---

Makoto found himself at his workstation yet again, at the start of another fruitless, meaningless day, which was carelessly sandwiched between a few relatively inconsequential episodes. Or maybe this was one of the days happening _during _an episode, but since the animators and storyboards were busy detailing other areas, he was here. Matsushiro was silent, and the Major was still on base, so it couldn't have been episodes seven, eight, ten, eighteen or nineteen, and all systems were operational, which exempted episodes eleven and thirteen. And Kaji was still alive, so that whole downward spiral of the last six episodes hadn't happened yet. But the Second Child had already arrived so it had to be sometime after episode seven. And the twentieth episode was out since Shinji hadn't been stuck in the Eva for a month. Yet. Was that supposed to happen anyway? Makoto shook his head in confusion and leaned back in his chair.

There was still nothing to do.

Shigeru rode up on that nifty elevator thingamajig and threw his lunch on the Comadore-64 screen, then mumbled about bruising the apple in the bottom of the paper bag. He pulled out the wheelie chair, and as his weight shifted onto the cushion, the seat let out a loud moan. It squeaked some more as he moved the chair back into place. Then it squeaked as he rocked a little. It squeaked as he logged onto the server. It squeaked as he cracked his neck. It squeaked as the system told him it could not log him on, and squeaked again as he retyped his password and username. It squeaked when the Macrowood Windouse operating system tone played out a morbid descending minor scale. It squeaked especially loud when he sighed in disgust and stared at the screen in contempt, contemplating pulling out the submachine gun he kept in the side drawer and blasting the piece-of-shit chair to hell. And then it just squeaked for shits and giggles.

"Fuck this," he said. "I'm going to the supply closet to get a new chair."

Makoto gazed at him tiredly. "What if something happens?"

Shigeru shrugged, dragging his chair across the linoleum. "Nothing will happen."

"The animators will get angry if you're not where they left you last time," the other tech reminded him.

"I know, jeez." The man with long hair tried fitting the chair on the elevator, but it wasn't quite working. "I'll only be a few minutes, so chill out."

---

I tried thinking about another scene, but it escaped me

---

"_Shinji."_ His father's voice mumbled over the end of the line. Shinji couldn't help but voice his surprise.

"D-Dad?!" He stuttered. "What—uh—what…?"

"_I want to talk with you."_

"O…Oh. Okay." Shinji scratched his head. "When?"

"_Right now."_

"But I don't even know where you are!"

"_The author will take care of that."_

He was referring to me; I influenced him by putting these facts into his head. I have a keyboard, and that's just like having telepathy.

"Oh," said Shinji, when he realized that I was putting the location of his father's whereabouts into his brain. And then he realized how his father was going to meet with him. "Wait a minute—"

But it was too late. The phone went dead and Section-2 agents swarmed out of nowhere, threw a bag over his head, beat him unconscious, tossed him into the back of a delivery van and drove off, but had to stop at a McDonalds to use the bathroom, so the driver decided to order a hamburger, and when the other man emerged from the bathroom to find the driver of the van sitting by a window chowing down, he berated him for not ordering _him_ something, which led to an argument that I never got around to fleshing out so it won't be included, but the point of the matter was that they resolved it as respectable gentlemen both of whose honors had just been put on the line—a duel to the death—and the bathroom-emerging-man-who-had-not-been-the-driver emerged victorious, ate the rest of the hamburger, threw the trash on the corpse, left it to management to take care of, and drove off in the van, but then had to stop at a street corner to recruit some local bum into the job his partner had just up until recently filled, and the bum happened to be an ex-marine bodybuilding lawyer, so he knew how to negotiate his own salary, and it was all cool; he even knit his own suit out of the words I'm pointlessly throwing out here, and managed to craft sunglasses and a sidearm out of the same sentence. At this point, it was going on three o'clock in the afternoon, and the Commander had wanted to see his son two hours ago, but because he was unavoidably detained, it couldn't be helped that the boy was thrown into his father's office at about four, since there was an incident on the freeway involving a shootout which may or may not be described later, and tied up traffic.

Several run-on sentences and a paragraph later: "Shinji."

"Father."

BUT, JUST AS IF IT WERE A TELEVISION SERIAL, IT WAS INTERRUPTED BY A PROGRAM OF STRANGE AND UNKNOWN ORIGIN, AND JUST WHEN THINGS MIGHT HAVE STARTED TO BE REPAIRED AND MAKE SENSE AGAIN, IT ALL REVERTED BACK TO THE REALM OF INTANGIBLE NONSENSE AND ABSURD ANTI-REALISM.

---

**THE HUGE PHANTASMAGORIC INTERLUDE: FUYUTSUKI'S BIG BREAK!!!!**

"Very well, make it so." The tech hurried out of the spacious office that was Gendo Ikari's throne room, happy to have departed so quickly.

The Ikari in question prepared to do that hilarious little hands-bridged-over-face-dramatically pose, but since he wasn't paying attention, his elbows slipped off the desk and he hit his jaw on the edge, resulting in a painful sounding thu-craiscgh.

"_Erfmghhh_," he uttered. Groaned, actually.

The Sub Commander stared at him, shocked. "I've been waiting years for you to do that," he exclaimed.

Gendo winced as he picked his face up, rubbing his jaw. "I think a cap came loose." He winced again and patted his fingers gently against the side of his cheek.

Fuyutsuki was hiding a smirk.

"No, I'm being serious," Gendo said. "I really think there's a cap loose. See? I can feel it with my tongue." He opened his mouth, gesturing to his subordinate. "Can you take a look for me?"

Fuyutsuki was stunned the second time in just as many minutes. "Uh, well," he took a look. "I think you should get that looked at. It could be serious."

"Shit," the Commander said, closing his mouth. "This was not part of the scenario," he mumbled, standing to leave. "Fuyutsuki, take care of things."

"Give my regards to the Doctor, when you see her." He nodded his head.

The door closed, and the only audible sound was the quiet hum of the air conditioner. Fuyutsuki looked around for awhile, standing in much the same pose as he had for a large part of the series—since the only scenes showing him sitting down either involved a Shōgi game or a flashback.

So he stood. He acted nonchalant. He acted ambiguous. He acted unaffected. The truth was he got bored very easily, as many college professors who quit their job to bring about a new chapter in human evolution do.

So he looked around a little more, searching for a hidden camera someplace that Ikari had installed without telling him. Then he considered that particular action to be vain.

He spotted the vacant Commander's chair, and he grinned evilly—something he didn't do often, since the animators tended to avoid having the ambiguous secondary characters grin at all.

He sat down.

He SAT DOWN.

He sat down in the COMMANDER'S CHAIR.

Notice the capitalization intended to represent emphasis.

It was rather comfortable, the Commander's chair. It was padded in full leather, with cup holders built into the armrests and a number pad that was synced with the miniature TV built above the desk. And it didn't squeak when he moved around.

And now, he thought, for the final touch. Elbows perched on the desk, wrists cocked, fingers threaded, eyes peeking over the resulting ridge… oh yeah, _this _was power. _Now_ he felt like he was in charge. _Now_ he felt the weight of the world. No wonder Gendo spent so much time like this. It was so freaking awesome.

The door intercom chimed. "I have the latest synch data." An anonymous voice filtered through the speaker on the desk.

"Enter," Fuyutsuki replied, motionless.

The door opened, and a tech without a memorable face walked in, unsteadily. The spaciousness of the office made anyone uneasy—and with Fuyutsuki glaring him down over the tops of his fingers… _man_; it made that old guy even creepier.

"S-sir." The tech stopped well short of the desk. "Here they, um, are."

"Very good," Fuyutsuki replied, as ominous as he could. Seconds passed in silence. "Leave them on the desk," he said, finally.

The tech approached, again, even more unsteadily. The Sub Commander could see he was shaking, the stack of papers rattling in his grasp. He cautiously set them down on the desk, stood straight, waited to be dismissed.

Fuyutsuki made a big show of taking the papers, made eye contact with the tech as he evened the pages out by patting the edges against the desk, looked at the papers dismissively, licked his thumb and forefinger, flipped through them, nodding, voicing various 'humm's and 'hermm's and 'ah hahhh's, reminiscing about doing this kind of thing all the time back when he taught… whatever it was he taught. He wasn't even reading any of it. He just liked giving the impression that he was.

"Impressive," he said, after a sigh. He looked back up at the tech, then made that hilarious hand bridge again. "Dismissed."

"Ye-yes sir!" The tech bowed his head and sprinted like the hounds of hell for the door.

Fuyutuski grinned. Again. And then he yawned. Gee, he thought, doing all of this gloomy stuff sure is getting tiring. I wonder how long Ikari is going to be gone…. But that wasn't a question. He only wondered it because it was a fitting time to utter such an absurd statement.

It was time for a coffee break, he decided, so he rose from the COMMANDER'S CHAIR and walked the length of the room towards the door that led to the hallway that led to the elevator that would drop him off near one of the fourteen various kitchens that littered the NERV pyramid like tent caterpillar cocoons.

When the doors opened, he was alone in the kitchen, and there was no coffee left. He frowned. Imagine this: a tall and lanky sixty-year-old man staring humorlessly down into an empty unmarked tin with a frown that seemed to slice his face in half. That was him. That was Sub Commander Fuyutsuki at that moment.

Shigeru Aoba walked in, and noticed the Sub Commander. "Hello, Sub Commander," he said cheerfully.

"Good morning," Fuyutuski mumbled.

"You know why I'm so chipper?" the young man asked. He didn't wait for an answer. "I'm chipper because this is one of the few times of day I look forward to. Coffee break. And I don't know where NERV gets its coffee, but it sure hits the spot, huh?" He chuckled deliriously. "I mean, it's coffee break! How cool is that?!"

"There… isn't any left." Fuyutuski told him.

Shigeru looked like he was pretending not to hear him. His goofy grin stayed plastered to his face, even when he stared down into the empty tin Fuyutuski had beheld mere moments prior.

"Oh," he said. "Shit," he said.

The moment of dawning comprehension finally hit him. "Damnit! You have to be kidding me! No way! This sucks!"

The Sub Commander blinked. "Yes," he said. "Yes it does."

Makoto Huuga walked in, casually, calmly. He noticed Shigeru and Fuyutuski, the former clearly stressed out, the later rather forlorn looking.

"What's up, guys?"

The fellow tech turned to him. "We're out of coffee!"

Fuyutsuki's frown got deeper.

The spectacled tech blanched. "Oh shit." Dragging a chair out from underneath the single table in the room, he stood on it to look through an overhead cupboard. "This is bad… We've never even been equipped with any full-scale coffee filters before."

Shigeru nodded absently. "Yeah. Only the Safeway generic brands, at best."

Makoto blinked. "Damn, we really are out coffee. If Command decides to mount another all-nighter for a reconfiguration or something, we're totally screwed."

"You're right," Shigeru glanced back at the empty tin. "They've been steadily cutting back on our kitchen supply budget for months—no doubt they've been planning this since the beginning." He clutched his fist. "The bastards."

"That's entirely possible."

Maya Ibuki walked in, probably because she felt awkward being the only person in the cavernous expanse that was the bridge. That's what Fuyutsuki figured, at least.

"Hi guys," she said.

All three men turned to look at her. "There's no coffee, if that's what you're after," Fuyutsuki says, breaking the short pause. "We might have to drink the Maxwell House stuff on the maintenance floor."

Maya blanched. "The maintenance floor?!" She cast a sidelong glance at the Sub Commander. "But we can't drink Maxwell House… They've less taste than us."

Makoto's voice came down from where his head was in the cupboard. "Too bad they don't think that way."

"I'm sure the higher-ups would sure like to compensate sometime by giving us decaff or some generic brand coffee garbage," Shigeru spat out. "Too bad we're sitting on top of the only coffee maker on the floor—otherwise they'd have given us those shitty ground grits by now."

"The cheap stuff would clog the thing, huh?" Makoto's voice was still muffled; he was still searching through the cabinet.

"I just hope they don't start using Yuban," the cynic leaned against the wall. "Things could get pretty ugly."

"Man, with things the way they are, you'd think that they'd just buy Chock full o'Nuts and get it over with. No wait—" Makoto straightened and beheld something in his hands. "That's a negative!" He exclaimed.

Shigeru saw what was in his coworker's hands. "Speak of the devil."

Fuyutsuki watched the spectacled lieutenant pour some of the contents into a filter. "That's a bit much."

They started to turn the coffee maker on, but something went wrong. It was almost imperceptible at first, but it became apparent upon closer inspection that nothing had happened.

"Try switching the left side over to blue," the ex-professor said to Makoto. "Use the back lever if you have to. There you go. What's the situation over on the right?"

Makoto shook his head. "Negative—all outgoing electricity is being cut off."

Shigeru eyes lit up. "The circuit's dead?"

"It's just as I thought." Fuyutsuki rubbed his chin, unplugged the unit, and plugged it into the bottom socket. Water started flowing.

Maya had been leaning against the table, watching. "How could we possibly want coffee this badly?"

The older man scratched his scalp as a thought occurred to him. "I can't even drink that Chock full o'Nuts shit," he said. "It tastes like I'm sipping motor oil out of a mud puddle, if I remember correctly."

Shigeru nodded. "You do. And it does." He sighed. "It's some pretty sick stuff, but it's the best we can do on a moment's notice."

Makoto shook his head. "I just hope we get resupplied soon. We can't keep getting held out like this—there's no telling what could happen."

"Tell me," Maya tugged on Shigeru's sleeve, fearful. "Did we do the right thing?"

"How the hell should I know?"

Suddenly, for no reason at all, and in an entirely unexpected manner, not preceded by any foreshadowing or forewarning at all, Fuyutsuki was struck with an indescribably strong feeling of déjà vu. So he left.

A few hallways, elevator rides, stairwells, indefinably long escalators, moving walkways, linoleum floors, fluorescent lights, security checkpoints, and a train ride later, the Sub Commander was standing on a street corner in the sparsely populated Tokyo-3. There seemed to be no one outside, and it looked eerie standing on the corner, he thought, with all the lights lit up and the sun beating down. Ghost town.

He found himself in an obscenely populated coffee shop. A loud, busy, hectic coffee shop, with a line many people deep, a seating area that took up what looked to be most of the block, and there only seemed to be a few people manning the counter.

Fuyutsuki frowned.

He nudged the guy in front of him; duster, shades, very old cargo pants showing signs of dry rot at the bottoms, loafers. The shades were actually transition lenses. The man got them cheap because the frames were on sale, otherwise he wouldn't have bothered. I know this because that man is me.

"Is today some sort of special day?" Fuyutsuki asked him, me. "There seems to be a lot of people here."

The man, me, put a finger to his lips in the universal sign to quiet down. He was nodding his head in a rhythmic pattern. "If you talk, you can't hear the music."

"What music?"

"There's always music, man." He told the ex-professor, the man that is me told the ex-professor. "You just have to listen. It's always there. Here. The there that is here, it's there, just listen, and you'll hear it."

Fuyutsuki heard the people, and then, when he looked at the speaker in the ceiling, and really focused, he realized the man was right. Of course I was. It's David Bowie, he realized, that was playing overhead. I like David Bowie.

"So you have some pretty good hearing," Fuyutsuki noted. I nodded. The man that was in front of him in line, who was actually me, nodded.

"There's nothing special at all," he said. I told him.

"What?"

"You asked, earlier," the man clarified, "about what was going on. If there was some day of festival here, in the shop." He shook his head. "Nah, man. Nothing. There's nothing especially out-of-ordinary going on that these people know about."

"Oh," Fuyutsuki said. He looked back at the cashier that was suddenly in front of him. "I'll, uh, have a, um… tall… latte?"

"Is that it?" the cashier deadpanned.

"Yeah."

"It's on the house," he said again, the latte in his grip, handing it to Fuyutsuki. When he blinked, Fuyutsuki found himself sitting in a window seat, and the man that was me sitting across from him, staring out the window.

"You'll have to bear with me," he, I, said. "I'm pulling a very sloppy Kurt Vonnegut here, but for different reasons." I drank some latte.

"I don't understand."

—You don't have to, I told him. It's all relative, but I'm going to try the best I can to explain it sufficiently. Did you notice that?

The David Bowie overhead changed over, started playing something that escapes me at the moment.

"Did I notice what?" Fuyutsuki blinked. "The song changed."

—Yeah, so did the narrative structure. I can't stay here very long, I told him, like this. Since I'm the uh, you know, the author, most of what I'll be saying will eventually just degrade into narrative, and quotation marks will become irrelevant. Already, these extended hyphens are showing up—ever read Joyce's work?

"No, I'm afraid I haven't."

—Don't worry about it. Now, what I wanted to tell you was, you weren't supposed to be the main character. Let me finish before you give me more weird looks. For some reason, you stole the spotlight for this last chapter, which I suppose is fine—hey, I know this song.

I suddenly recognized the song that was playing overhead.

"You were saying…"

—I was saying that, uh, well, I'm not sure where I was headed with the conversation, but it did have a point. My mind is melding with the speech already. Well, I suppose I should just tell you that this was supposed to be the last chapter, but since you suddenly had to go and mess everything up with this pointless interlude, I'm going to have to tack on a poorly written encore chapter just to get the story tied up in a neat little bow and don't get these reader morons on my case for ending on a chapter that made no sense at all.

"So," Fuyutsuki placed his elbows on the table. "You're telling me that all of this is my fault?"

"No," the man said.

There was no one left in the coffee shop. There was black void outside that window.

No, I began, again talking to Fuyutsuki. No, I'm saying to you that I can't control all of this stuff. You people aren't even my creations; I'm borrowing you from studio Gainax—and even then you're all shared by countless others that use you to create _other_ stories.

Fuyutsuki was silent.

It just started as an experiment, really, if you want the truth. I just wanted to see how far I could push the whole idea of cohesive inference via means of incoherency and disjoint scenes hodgepodged together. You know, infer a plot line without explicitly stating what the whole point was? I was trying to do that.

"And…?"

And it didn't work. The operation was a disaster, just one huge oversight and subsequent fuck up after another. And it didn't occur to me until I had already inserted myself into the narrative that having this talk with you would be meaningless, because it wouldn't solve anything. As the author, I'm really just writing your movements anyhow—see, by talking about it like this, I just made you take another sip of your latte.

And again he was silent.

I'm just playing with you. And I know that. And we've reached the end—the hyphens have stopped appearing, and no quotation marks are present, all of this is just rambling narrative. It's impossible to restore order. We're all just fumbling around without a clue. It is as it is in Naufana and Ghadis; nothing is true, and therefore everything is permitted…

---

Coming up next: the grand finale that is terribly dry and overly dramatic and almost completely unrelated to the story thus so far!!!


	5. In Media Res: The Reality Zone

**Disclaimer: **I don't own NGE. Or the cockamamie ratings guide. Or the pop single hit "Komm, Susser Todd," off of (one of) the soundtrack(s). Or Coca-Cola.

**Author's Note:** One of the most post-modern pieces of fanfiction I've ever written. Certainly not the most post-modern piece of fiction I've written, but in terms of fanfiction… definitely.

It's dramatic. I guess the only comedic aspect to it is that it was supposed to be unexpected and from out of left field. All in all though, this chapter is meant to be taken seriously.

* * *

_In Media Res._

---------------------------------------------

Trailer: Dreams From Hell

Now Showing: Illusionary Delusions

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The following short film has been deemed appropriate for ALL AUDIENCES. The film presented has been rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for images of surrealistic violence, adult themes, and drug or alcohol use.

---

Whispers down the hall. Echoes of a song that had faded hours prior. The squeak of a ceiling fan. The hum of the building's air conditioner. Someone in the other room, drinking; the clink of another empty can against the table.

A serpent on his shoulder, covered in green and purple ooze. It felt like his skin was on fire, burning away the tissue, searing his nerves; a hundred thousand poison stings across the skin underneath the green and purple ooze. It congealed, flowed, penetrated into each pore, coagulated, became hard as concrete and it was still _inside of him_.

The scream that erupted from his throat distorted his vision—but that could have been the pain—and he opened his eyes, still screaming, a hand straining through his hair as he bolted upright, the other hand flailing out and knocking all the things on his nightstand to the floor. He couldn't breathe, but the bottle of J&B calmed his nerves to something just above a slight tremor.

The floor was cold to the soles of his bare feet. The bathroom was just ahead. The light was blinding to his sleep-stricken pupils, and he winced as the mirror came into focus.

He hadn't realized he was still holding the bottle until he dropped it. He didn't hear it shatter on the floor. He didn't feel the contents spill around his toes. His gaze was transfixed on the world trapped in the mirror.

The beard came off of his chin like sand, followed by the sideburns. In a breathless panic, he started tearing at his face, scraps of skin peeling off like the remnants of a rubber mold. He slammed his fist into the mirror, shattering the image that it reflected. Now there were dozens of tiny faces looking at him, and all he could do was weep as the last of a father's face fell into the sink.

And then he opened his eyes.

The scream was not his own, but it came from out of his mouth. He needed a drink, badly—but, he faltered, did he even drink at all?

The door closed with a 'click'. The footsteps receded with quiet 'thumps' interspersed with strange 'hiss'es and 'pop's that emanated from the faulty soundtrack.

It was 12:55. There was still a long while, but the night consumed everything and flickered a little bit.

And he screamed as he felt his face come off.

---------------------------------------------

And now for our feature presentation…

(The following film has been rated PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned) for adult themes, bad role modeling, jazzy music, drug and alcohol use, profanity, scenes of suicide, brief violent images, narcissism, abstract absurdism, and father complexes)

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_A IkariStreet Production… _

It was a bright and sunny morning. The bird chirps came from the numerous trees that lined the sides of the orderly, vacant, swept street. The sky was wonderfully blue, and colors bright and radiant, and there wasn't a cloud for miles in any direction. The sun was blazing anew once more, revitalized by the dark vacation of night.

_A John Doe Picture…_

"Shinji, time for breakfast!" Toast popped out of the toaster as she said this; a short brown tuft of hair whose face was hidden by a cabinet door.

_Executive Producer…_

"Thanks, mom…" A boy yawned and sat down. He gazed at the slightly burnt toast with mild disinterest, before starting to nibble on a piece.

…_Kihl Lorenz_

"Will Asuka be over today?" Her face, no longer obscured by the cabinet, was smiling and blank as she prepared a container of grapefruit juice.

_Directed by…_

"I don't know." His mumbled reply was distorted by the food he was unenthusiastically eating. "…Maybe."

…_Gendo Ikari_

"Just remember to clean up and say goodbye to your father before you leave for school, okay?" She set a glass of the newly-prepared grapefruit juice down on the table. "There you go, with a spoonful of sugar just like you always like it."

_Presented in GizmotiCon-o-Colour™_…

He stopped. "What did you say?"

"I said to clean up and say goodbye to—"

"No, before that." He saw her looking at him strangely. "Never mind, it doesn't matter." He ate the rest of the toast and sipped some of the juice, but "It's a little on the bitter side."

"I'm sorry. Let me—"

"No, it's fine. I'll just—actually, I think it's almost time to leave anyhow, so really…." When he returned, he already had his school bag in his hands. He paused on his way out the door, uncertainty ringing in his ears. "I'll see you, uh, later, I guess."

The apartment door shut before she had a chance to tell him to brush his teeth. "…Just like your father."

…_**Illusionary Delusions**__…_

Shinji sat in the not-quite-decrepit stairwell, where the concrete was cool to the touch in the blistering heat. He heard a door to an apartment above him open and close, the footsteps toward his spot heralding another presence. They stopped before they reached the stairwell, but he couldn't see who it was—probably just his father taking the elevator down to the car. Anything to avoid his own son. Of course.

His sigh echoed in the deceptively small place. The windows in the stairwell lacked glass, so they were really just little more than large rectangular holes in the concrete that left anyone using the stairs open to the elements. He wondered whether anyone actually thought about putting glass in the windows, since it would probably be easier in a storm to get up the steps that way—less slipping, less puddles; the leaks in the cracked concrete were bad enough, but the open windows were just…

The sound of a bird chirping echoed into the hollow stairway. He was the only one in the whole world that heard the bird, that saw the bird, that experienced it, sitting there, staring at him through beady little opaque eyes, twitching, hopping about, rustling its feathers—and then it was gone, as abruptly as it had come, in another flutter of wings. The silence that followed made him realize that he heard something… distant, sort of, but it was hard to place, it was quiet, and easily droned out, like the ringing in his ears that was always there, but this was even softer… it sounded… almost like… it was…

"_There_ you are. I was ringing your doorbell for the last five minutes! You could have at least _told _me that you planned on leaving early today, jeez." Asuka plopped down next to him on the step. "Whatcha lookin' at?"

Was it a shrug? "Nothing, really."

They sat in silence. Shinji continued to stare at the empty space that took up the inside of the gaping rectangle on the wall, imagining something that could block it up, seal it, fill it somehow.

"Well hey, let's go. I'd love to sit here on this step forever too, but we can't do that." She stood up and brushed off her skirt. "We shouldn't be too late if we just—"

"Asuka?" His gaze hadn't left the empty rectangle. "Let's not—" he stopped. "Well… no. Sorry."

"…What?"

Shaking his head, he backpedaled as best he could. "No, forget it. I didn't say anything." He stood up and started down the steps, leaving her momentarily behind. "Let's go. We can't be late again."

She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Right behind you." It was going to be one of _those_ days, was it?

---

The classroom was as bare as it had always been; exposed concrete walls, utilitarian desks, a beat-up chalkboard, water-damaged ceiling tiles, cold metal storage cabinets filled with office junk. Someone had left the chalk out the previous day, and a cluster of giddy girls were currently huddled around a corner of the blackboard drawing strange faces and comics to pass the time. Rei was on the other side of the board, occupying her time with a drawing of a giant robot.

She was aware of Shinji as he approached and stood next to her, in rapt fascination of the small portrait on the board. "What…_is_ that, Rei?"

Her hand paused in mid stroke, the almost-translucent skin on her fingers polluted with multicolored chalk dust stains. She turned her head slowly, deliberately, an unidentifiable look in her eye as she observed him. She watched Shinji tear his eyes off of the strange figure on the board to focus on her.

"—Uh…" The words fought over themselves to escape his mouth. None of them survived.

"Shinji! Man, I didn't know you'd gotten here already!" The sleeve of a maroon tracksuit slapped him on the back.

A pair of glasses ducked to his left, shoving a video camera into his face. "Yeah, when _did_ you get here?"

"Come on, talking to Nagisa is starting to get tedious and awkward." He started to drag Shinji toward the back of the class. If Rei noticed, she didn't show it; her gaze transfixed on the figure on the board and the chalk in her hands. "We gotta have someone with their head on their shoulders to keep the balance, right Ken-man?"

"Right-o, T-man."

Shinji spotted Kaworu leaning up against the wall, arms folded, bemused chuckle on his face. "And there he is, the man of the hour."

Shrugging Toji off, Shinji sat down at his desk. Kensuke dropped down at his own, beside him, and the jock half-sat on the edge of his desk. Kaworu took an unoccupied seat to Shinji's left.

A conversation commenced somewhere in the background between the three of them, Shinji's focus on an entirely different thought train completely—namely, the pair of B-cups that had just returned from the blackboard and taken her seat by the window. He watched her irises flicker over his reflection—establishing eye contact for but a brief, heart-wrenching moment—before focusing on the blue in the sky. It was vacant of clouds, pure, he realized, as his eyes found the same destination.

"Isn't that right, Shin-man?"

The sky seemed so far away from him, and yet, at the same time…

"Yo, Shinji!" A freckled hand waved in front of his face. He blinked, and as his eyelids opened, he saw the character named Kensuke.

"Uh—yeah, sure." He made a quick recovery. "Sure, um. What, uh, what was the subject?" His eyes had trouble focusing on the group presented in front of him.

Toji grasped his forehead and threw the rest of it backwards. "Oh, man! You don't mean that I hafta recount the _whole thing_, do you? Man, pay attention, nimrod!"

Everyone looked at Shinji expectantly, for some sort of response. The background noise of other conversations carried on, though for some reason, the man of the hour felt as though the whole class was waiting for him to say something.

"I'm… sorry?"

Kaworu gave a shrug and a lopsided, half-hearted attempt at a grin. "Don't worry. You didn't miss much."

Distantly, behind him: "Jeez, Toji. You sound like our teacher." But that faded into the background noise.

"Do you have lunch today?" Kaworu was the only one talking to him, now. Toji and Kensuke had dissolved into chatter. Oddly, he felt as though Rei's stare in the window was still directed at him, though he was also positive that she was focused beyond his reflection.

Shinji looked away from the window, settled his gaze on the boy leaning against a neighboring desk. "Yeah. It's not much, just some…" he paused. "Well, you know. Lunch 'n all. I guess. Food, right?" He supplied a dead chuckle, part of his lines.

Kaworu's smile was troubled. "Are you feeling alright?"

"Uh… yeah. Why?" Now he was sure that was Ayanami's gaze he could feel.

The background noise of chatter that vaguely resembled white noise and radio static and poor production quality faded into silence as a pair of stilettos walked into the classroom and stopped in front of the chalkboard. The giggling gaggle of girls at the board wasn't there anymore; lost somewhere in the prior moments and stage directions.

"We'll talk at lunch." By the time Shinji heard the words, Kaworu was already in his seat, somewhere. He still felt Ayanami's gaze. And he still heard music.

---

Homeroom ends. Cue the sets and props: next class, next teacher, start!, lecture, boredom, a pair of eyes staring out the window, staring at a pair of eyes through the window, lecture, white legs, blue ink cartridge (when'd he get that?) writing down gibberish, (blue) penguin in the margins, lecture, blue skirt, blue sky, chalk robot on the blackboard, boredom, a pair of eyes staring at a reflection in the window, staring at a pair of eyes in a reflection in the window, fantasize, drop a pen, lecture, boredom, pick it up, color the penguin in the margins, more gibberish written down, hope there's more to it than this, lecture, boredom, bell (lather, rinse, repeat).

---

The rooftop was bland and desolate, interspersed with tiny cracks and long rust stains that fed into drainage gutters, the railings bled similar hues that trickled like blood down the sides of the building. Dust, a few mysterious pebbles, cracks of green paint that had flaked off of the decrepit railings. The hinges on the door were loud and emitted piercing cries of torture.

Footsteps scuffled in the wind. Shinji Ikari paused in mid saunter, debating for a second whether he wished to sit on the lip of the building, or lean on the railing. He opted to sit, leaning his back against a rusting pole. The sun bathed his face in heat. Sweat trickled off his brow. His misshapen shadow draped itself across the cracks in the cement.

"You look beat." Kaworu was already by his side, standing, leaning on the rail, staring down into the small courtyard area below. People convened around each other and formed groups like shapeless amoebas.

Shinji was staring into the sun. "I am."

Kaworu's insulated lunch bag was between them. "Didn't sleep well?"

"Didn't really sleep." A cloud's shadow became noticeable as a line of shade started to slowly engulf the school buildings. Kaworu noticed it. Shinji didn't care.

The albino-boy sighed and turned away from the courtyard spectacle, leaned with his back against the railing. He knelt, until he came to squat next to the lunch bag, unzipping it to reveal two cold—sweating—cans of soda. He handed one to Shinji, who took it wordlessly.

"Why do you keep coming up here for lunch?"

At first, Shinji didn't respond. He hadn't even opened his Dr. Pepper. Condensation slithered down its cold exterior like teardrops against a windowpane.

---

—Stop.

Blackboard. Desk. Bag. Classroom door. Hallway. Stairwell. Railing. Kachink. Door with the cold metal handle. Sunlight. Sidewalk. Old wall with paint flaking off and all the graffiti. Apartment complex. Windowless stairwell with the missing rectangle. Apartment door. Click. No shoes. Room door. Fwish. Chair—desk—blinds drawn—laundry needs to be done—mattress.

And the ceiling gets all blurry.

Close the eyes; rest for a little while.

Blackness.

There is nothing.

---

Words filtered through the door, light, just above a whisper: "I'm home."

Shinji was roused from his nap by an unknown urge. He lay motionless for minutes, staring across his room at nothing in particular, thinking, experiencing, existing. On the other side of his door, sounds of his mother's arrival were soft and mingled with the noises of the dishwasher, the hum of the refrigerator, the quiet din of the air conditioner—and that incessant, low, undeniable _music_ that was emanating from everything and all the same time, nothing at all.

The light tap comes from his door. Light seeped through the crack that appeared at it shifted sideways.

"…Shinji?"

He sat up. "Oh… hi. I um, I didn't realize you had gotten home already."

"Don't sleep too long, dear. You'll ruin your internal clock that way." His mother's voice sounded vague and far away.

"Sorry," he said, but he didn't think she was listening any longer. Seconds later, he was perching his chin on his fist, elbow resting on the desk. The blind in front of the solitary window of his room was drawn, even though sunlight still beat against the other side. His tiny office-style desk lamp did its best to illuminate the dark confines of the room, but failed.

"Dinner will be ready soon, Shinji." His mother called again from the other side. "How much studying are you doing tonight?"

Routine questions—part of the script. He thought for a minute. What was he supposed to say next?

---

On her way to school, Rei stopped to read the graffiti on the crumbling wall next to the park, about a block from her apartment complex, half a block from the station. It flickered and hissed with static, phased in and out.

She fixed the problem by adjusting the readable frequencies it needed to pick up, twisting the antenna a little bit.

---

Homeroom. Beautiful violet hair preaching the importance of attendance, two pairs of red eyes eying him up, a camcorder imitating a flight simulator somewhere in the room, some guy in a jumpsuit busy not caring about anything, freckles and brunette checking over the day's events, a foreigner who's been here most her life typing furiously on a keyboard, a pencil in a hand, a glance at the clock, a second hand ticking on and on, this is how it's always been.

---

"Hey," Kaworu was on the roof before Shinji.

Shinji nodded his acknowledgement. "Hi."

They were silent for awhile. Kaworu leaned on the railing with his elbows and forearms, his gaze sending him into the great blue of the cloudless sky.

Shinji approached and stood next to him, but said nothing.

"There are clouds in the distance," Kaworu said, after awhile. "See them? You can almost make out their shapes, but they're so far away."

Shinji sighed. "Think it's going to rain?"

The silver-haired boy shrugged and rested his chin on rail. "I know it'll rain," he said. "But I doubt we'll have anything to worry about."

---

The teacher droned on. Homework was passed out. Classwork was collected. A short quiz was administered.

None of the characters quite lined up, and the few that did were kind of blurry. When he made a few marks above the spaces, they just dribbled together like watered-down paint cascading through the creases of a folded piece of paper. It was like a dream.

He woke up with Rei's gaze burning holes in his neck. Her umbrella was clutched in her lithe fingers. Care seeped from the ducts near her eyes. The classroom was totally vacant, save for the lone desk he was sprawled over, the chair he sat in, herself, himself, and the blood red light that poured through the windows—the setting sun. Clouds overlapped the sky in folds and layers. The sun was a giant iris, watching the world before it blinked away.

"Are you feeling well?"

Her voice was a melody of a single note, but it sounded comforting, and he didn't know why.

"W-what do you mean?" He pulled his head off his desk. No drool. Accomplishment.

She prodded him with the tip of her umbrella, right in the ribs.

"You should head home," she whispered. "Your companions have long since departed."

He blinked. "Why did you stay?"

It was almost a sigh, almost a smile. "You've been having a nightmare."

He leaned into the backrest, cracking a few vertebrae. "…I have?"

She nodded. "You have," she said. "But it's over now. It's alright."

"I… can't remember anything," he said.

"There is no problem," she declared, and started toward the door. "I will see you tomorrow."

"Oh… okay."

The sun set. He watched the giant eye blink, and he thought about the clouds rolling in.

---

A whisper: "I'm home." The door closed with a thunk, another pair of shoes removed at the entranceway. Long shadows cascaded into the hall, the kitchen lights ablaze, a figure moved about; the smell of a meal being cooked accompanied the sizzle and spatter of a skillet.

Shinji made his way towards his room.

"You're a little late, aren't you?" His father called to him from his chair in the kitchen. Shinji halted at the open doorway, drinking in the sight of both parents sharing the same room.

"Sorry," he replied. "I got held up at school. It's nothing to worry about."

Gendo nodded solemnly. In front of him was a triangular piece of wood, feathered with plastic pins. It was a board game he had seen in restaurants over the years. But Shinji relented, and finally got to his room.

"Don't fall asleep," his mother called from the kitchen. "Dinner will be ready soon."

---

The knock at the door was Asuka, and with his things together, Shinji grabbed his lunch off the table and sauntered out the door. He muttered a farewell as he departed, but was unsure as to whether his parents heard it or not.

"Hey there, sleepyhead." Asuka had been leaning against the concrete railing opposite of the apartment door.

He shrugged a reply, and started toward the stairs.

"What's _with_ you these days, Ikari?" She cast him a weird look as she took up the tail. "Why are you so mopey all of a sudden? Your uncle die?"

He shook his head. "I don't know, Asuka." He scratched his neck absently as the two descended the stairs. "It's just… I don't quite feel like everything's the same."

He stepped off onto the ground, Asuka leaped from her place four steps above. "Why would it be? Everything's always changing."

"That's not what I mean," he said. "I don't feel like I belong here."

She blinked. "_You_ don't feel like you belong?" She scoffed and walked ahead of him. "You're not the one with red hair and a pale complexion."

He let the rhetoric sink in, but another question sank into his mind. "Do you remember anything that happened before three days ago?"

She stopped at the crosswalk and gave him a weird look. "On Saturday, a group of us went downtown to see a lame zombie movie, and on Sunday we got the quartet together for a few hours."

Shinji frowned. "That's what I was afraid of."

"Oh, what is it now?" she groaned. "I swear; you need to start seeing somebody, before you lose your mind."

He sighed, and mumbled to himself, "I didn't think you'd understand."

She paused for half a second as she cast a gaze over her shoulder, but Shinji didn't even notice.

That was the day she disappeared.

---

Class. Handouts. Lecture. Quiz. End-stopped rhetoric. Superfluous sentences with no underlying meaning.

Packet on his desk:

NEON GENESIS: EVANGELION: THE BEAST or AN UNFAMILIAR CEILING

Inside is courier new typeface, size twelve. It's a screenplay. Giant robots.

—Plugsuit—Misato—Father—locker room—hospital wing—Rei—empty apartment—warm water penguin—piloting—pain—emptiness—breathing in fluid—

Words from a different packet; _She says, "It is my link."_

He knew it all already.

---

Rei watched the teenagers as they spray painted a wall. It only took a few minutes, but soon there was an image of a giant purple-and-green robot where once there was poorly painted white brick. It stared forward, down the street, a single arm outstretched, fist clenched, a tiny figure held captive in its hand. Dark eyes gleamed from underneath the brow of the mecha armor.

The captive figure was smiling.

The prisoner was about to die, and he was happy.

---

"Shinji?" The boy came out of his reverie, face-to-face with his homeroom teacher. She had to hunch over to look him in the face, and in doing so, the collar of her shirt hung down a little more than she might have been aware of. Had he been feeling normal, he probably would have noticed.

He blinked tiredly.

"Are you feeling alright?"

"Yeah, Miss Katsuragi," he mumbled, yawning. "I'm just… tired, is all." He sighed. "Why?"

"You were zoned out all class," she said, pulling a chair out from the desk in front of him and sitting down. "I didn't want to say anything, since I know you've never been an overly… ecstatic person. But still, you've never been this inattentive."

He looked around. "Where is everyone?" he asked.

"They've all gone home," she said, looking him in the eye. "The last bell rang ten minutes ago."

A break. He sighed.

"What—" he cleared his throat, then continued, "what about Ayanami?"

She looked at him strange. "She didn't come in, today. Why? What's wrong?"

"Oh." He sighed, again. "I should probably head home, then."

"Shinji," he was already standing up, "You'd come to me if anything were bothering you, wouldn't you?" She looked sad.

He felt his left hand tense. "Y-yeah, of course, Miss Katsuragi."

She watched him leave the room, heard his footsteps echo down the vacant hallway, felt the emptiness in the building, and it was a reflection of what she already knew.

---

Rei encountered him on the sidewalk.

"You are improvising." Blue hair and skirt wavering in a quiet breeze.

"What?" Shinji regarded her poise.

"It is almost finished," she said. "It is almost complete. This is the last barrier that must be torn down, this wall." She motioned to the wall she passed every day to school, now littered with graffiti that portrayed a mural of events, fourteen different monsters, four different robots, five kids; an enormous movie poster for a film that didn't exist. "It's the only thing that stands in your way."

"But I… but I like it here," was his reply.

Silence punctuated by rhetoric: "Do you?"

Shinji found the words stuck in his throat.

"You cannot stay here forever." Her voice was the spring breeze on a funeral day. "The others have all coalesced and reformed. The damage has all but been reversed. We're only waiting for you."

"Rei—"

"If you do not tear it down, your world will be warped to become its parallel."

"But Rei—"

But she was gone.

---

The place was an empty shell.

"I'm home," he whispered, removed his shoes, started towards his room. As he passed the kitchen, he noticed that his father hadn't moved from his place at the table since the previous night. The paper was still clutched in his hands. Not even his breathing could be heard.

Shinji retired to bed, and hoped the night would be quick.

---

He was having trouble orienting himself. His hands read in plain words: 'you are dirty'. Sections of walls seemed to rebuild themselves with all the dust reverberating off of them—or was it just that static was interfering with the validity of their existence?

Walking out of his room—to do that, he had to push his door aside—he found himself in the classroom. Miss Katsuragi was there. No one else. She smiled. _You can always come to me if anything bothers you_, she's mouthing. Words come out like underwater. The kitchen is where her desk should be. He feels himself grow hard, and he doesn't have the mind to question why. Miss Katsuragi dangles her legs off the single student desk, behind you (him?) is the highway that is still being built.

Rei smiles as he approaches the desk she is sitting on. Your mother is in the kitchen, preparing a meal, sausage sizzling in the skillet. You reach out to touch Rei's face. He is very hard. Rei is smiling. His hand caresses her cheek. This isn't the classroom at all, you're in a field, Asuka's wearing a sundress, and his mother calls, "Dinner's ready!"

Father at the table, newspaper up in front of his face. You're already there. The sausage is actually a bucket of worms, and the skillet that his mother was using is actually the hand control for Eva. Position target in center, pull switch, he thinks dumbly.

He pulls the switch. Sachiel goes down in a blaze of smoke and empty canisters, and you're suddenly staring Rei in the face, who sits on the desk, in a classroom that his door opened into. I'm finding it all get blurry—you find—I—he—the last obstacle to overcome is not the present/future/past tense, it is in fact the—

---

Shinji woke up. He was sweating, and had a raging hard-on. When he tried to remember the dream, all that came to has the smile that Rei was giving to him as she dangled her legs off of a school desk, but even that wasn't very clear. Something about worms… pull switch? What did that mean?

His alarm clock said that it was three in the morning. His mouth said he was thirsty. His head said that he was dizzy and having trouble staying vertical, no thanks to the dream that had to awake him from much needed slumber.

The idea that was Yui Ikari stood with her back to him in the kitchen, frozen. The idea that was Gendo Ikari sat at the table, newspaper in front of his face.

Shinji stared at the statues of his parents from the kitchen doorway.

"…Mom? Dad?"

Silence. The only light was coming from where the full moon poured itself through the sliding glass door that led out onto a small balcony, in the living room—the shades were drawn and partially closed, but bars of pearlescent light cascaded into the kitchen and bathed things in stripes. The shadows were marionettes.

The boy clenched his left hand, but he did not realize it. His voice shook. "…Mom? …Dad?"

Neither figure was moving. Neither figure was even breathing.

He cautiously approached the statue that was his mother. Her apron looked as it did when he watched her do the dishes after dinner. Not a hair was out of place. The closer he got, the faster his uncontrolled heartbeat raced.

He looked at her face, and it was blank skin stretched over the head of a mannequin.

---

"Yo, Shin-man! You look like you had a rough night!" The cliché jock-in-the-jumpsuit character yelled at him as he walked into the classroom. "Where's the wife?"

Shinji rubbed his forehead. "What are you talking about?"

"Where _is_ Asuka? She hasn't been here for a few days, has she?" The cliché nerd boy adjusted his glasses. "Has she been feeling well?"

The protagonist sighed. "I don't know. I haven't seen her for a few days, myself."

"Weird," one of them muttered.

Shinji blinked. "Yeah," he said to himself. "It is..."

---

"I like it here," Kaworu said, as Shinji leaned against the railing of the roof. "I like it here because I don't have to kill anyone, or force anyone into decisions."

Shinji stared at the overcast sky. "What does that mean?"

The other boy smiled wistfully, grey hair quivering in the slight breeze. "I just like it here," he repeated, crimson irises glinting in an odd fashion. "And I'm glad I met you," he went on, throwing his legs over the railing. "I'm afraid it's time for me to go, however."

He leaned his body far out over the courtyard, arms behind his shoulders, fingers white from gripping the railing.

Shinji looked at him. He had a headache. "What are you doing?"

Kaworu turned his head to look back at Shinji, giving him a smile.

"There was a time when I told you that death is the only absolute freedom there ever was."

And suddenly, Kaworu was just a memory.

It was all Shinji could do; staring down at the bloody corpse fifty feet below where he stood, unwavering gaze, pale blue meeting a different kind of red. He felt nothing. The air turned cold, and the sky darkened a little more, but the only thing that drew his eye was how red the blood was against the bleak grey of the sidewalk.

No rewind. No pause/play. No stop. Cue the piano; enter "Komm, Susser Todd".

The door to the roof opened, and Rei stood in the hollow stairwell beyond. Shinji wanted everything to stop happening. Rei approached him, laid a pale hand on his arm.

"It's time," she murmured.

"Okay," Shinji conceded. She led him away.

He closed his eyes, and imagined it was all a dream.

---

When he opened them again, he recognized the wall.

"What is this?" he asked.

"This is the final barrier," she told him. "The Fourth Wall has been irreparably destroyed, and only the sleeper can mend it."

"Why?"

"Because this is both your dream and your escape," she replied. "But you are divergent, and you have separated yourself from your heart. The images and ideas you have shaped here have stagnated or set themselves free, no longer your own. Your self-denial has led to the destruction of this fantasy world."

She placed his hand on the mural of the faraway place.

And it all went away. Come tumbling down. Tumbling, tumbling—

Fade out.

---

Sound: a high-pitched whine.

"_Reality exists in a place unknown, and dreams exist within reality."_

"_And truth is in your heart."_

"_For it is the hearts of people that create their appearance."_

"_And new images will change peoples' hearts and appearances. The power of imagination is the power to create your own future, and your own flow of time."_

"_But people must act of their own free will, or nothing will change at all…"_

The television flickered off with an abrupt zap. He placed the remote control down on table, heaved a sigh. His backpack was by the door, and he grabbed it on his way out.

The sound the door made as it closed was similar to the sound of a gentle knock that roused him from the deepest sleep.


End file.
